


The Centaurs' Tale

by leveragehunters (Monkeygreen), littleblackfox



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Art, Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes's Metal Arm, Canon Divergence - Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Canon-Typical Violence, Captain America Reverse Big Bang 2018, Centaurs, Doctor Strange - Freeform, Established Relationship, M/M, Multiverse, Non-Consensual Body Modification, POV Multiple, Protective Steve Rogers, Steve Rogers Feels, and, clint barton - Freeform, tony stark - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-19
Updated: 2018-05-19
Packaged: 2019-05-06 01:17:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 31,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14631039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Monkeygreen/pseuds/leveragehunters, https://archiveofourown.org/users/littleblackfox/pseuds/littleblackfox
Summary: "You know how I sometimes call you a horse's ass?""Yeah?""It's a hell of a lot more accurate now."It's the same old story: another day, another bad guy with designs on the planet showing up in New York City. But prepared as they are for weirdness—and Steve and Bucky thought they'd seen and suffered it all—neither of them are quite ready for where this particular tale winds up.Or, to be completely accurate, where thispairof tails winds up.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you first to littleblackfox for creating the amazing art that inspired this story, for betaing it for me (although I kept poking at it afterwards, so any mistakes are on me), and for being an absolute and utter delight both to work with and generally. Also, deep and sincere thanks to the CapRBB mods for organising the Bang so incredibly well, and thank you to everyone who listened to me flail while writing this. 
> 
> And last, but absolutely not least—thank you to all those fic writers who craft such amazing, creative, and wonderful AUs: myths, monsters, magic, or mundane; straight down the line or straight-up crack; and anything and everything in between...keep on keeping on. ❤

Steve woke up slow. It was a luxury he treasured, waking up slow, knowing he was in a safe place with the weight of Bucky lying across him.

He didn't open his eyes, just breathed deep and even as he trailed his fingers across Bucky's bare shoulder. Bucky didn't stir, didn't react. Steve treasured that, too.

There were some things Steve didn't much like about how their life was now, but Bucky sleeping deeply enough not to react at Steve's touch, Bucky not treating every change, every little shift in his surroundings like a claxon call of danger, demanding he wake—that was a goddamned gift.

Steve traced a line across Bucky's right shoulder, across the nape of his neck, running his fingers through the soft length of Bucky's hair. He dipped down to circle but not touch the metal of his left shoulder, rubbing gently at knots and tension even sleep couldn't soothe, proof of the ever-present pain the metal arm brought him.

Bucky was locked in a constant cycle of damage caused by its weight, by the way it was practically welded into his bones—and Steve knew it wasn't _welded_ , knew there were all sorts of complicated terminology for how it was attached to Bucky, but they both thought _welded_ captured the feel. Bucky healed, his body dealt with the damage, but it took time, nothing stopped it from hurting, and once it was healed it'd just happen all over again.

Not that Steve had known it was happening. He'd known _something_ was wrong, but Bucky had kept it locked away for way too long. And even though Bucky had finally told _him_ , he still wouldn't let anyone else know.

Tony had offered to work on his arm, to 'upgrade the primitive technology' enough that it had taken on the rhythm of rote, but Bucky shut him down every time. Steve didn't think it was precisely lack of trust, not wanting anyone poking at it, but Bucky wasn't exactly forthcoming and Steve wasn't going to push him.

He just wished there was a way to stop it hurting. 

Brushing his knuckles lightly over Bucky's metal shoulder—lightly, always lightly, even though he knew the touch would barely register—he let his fingers glide up the line of Bucky's neck to graze across his jaw, feeling the rough scratch of stubble under his nails.

Bucky shifted, smiled as Steve brushed his thumb over his bottom lip, and Steve opened his eyes to meet Bucky's half-lidded gaze.

"Mornin'." It was husky and rough, barely awake, but warm. It was so warm. Steve wanted to roll around in it.

"Hey." He rubbed the sensitive skin at the corner of Bucky's mouth, was rewarded with a kiss on the tip of his thumb. "Didn't mean to wake you up."

Bucky shook his head, lifted his arms in a half-aborted stretch, wincing and sighing in annoyed frustration as he settled back against Steve. "I was gettin' there anyway."

Steve kind of hated himself for the emotions the wince woke in him. The wince meant Bucky was hurting, and Steve hated seeing Bucky hurting; there wasn't much he wouldn’t do to make it stop. But a small, dark, selfish part of him knew no one else got to see it. No one else got to know. Once Bucky had admitted the pain the arm caused him, he'd stopped hiding it from Steve.

Hell, he'd started taking it over the top. Just last week, Steve had been peacefully reading only to have Bucky shove his thumb in front of his face and demand Steve deal with a papercut.

Steve had treated Bucky to his most unimpressed look and informed him, "There's band aids in the bathroom." There were, in fact, band aids in the bathroom. Winnie the Pooh band aids.  They were there because Steve had bought them the week before that, when Bucky had demanded Steve help him with a hangnail.

It had led to Steve being treated to the sight of Bucky, the former Winter Soldier, dangerous in ways words couldn't capture, charging into battle with a bright pink Piglet wrapped around his thumb.

Shaking his head at the memory, Steve settled his hand at the edge of Bucky's metal shoulder. "How bad?"

"How long is a piece of string?" Bucky said ruefully. "It's not like I've got any real basis for comparison."

"Dumb question, huh?"

"Well, you've gotta go with what you know," Bucky said, straight-faced, then broke into a grin as Steve rolled his eyes.

"Okay, dumb question number two: gonna let me look after you?" Except it wasn't a dumb question. Not really. Let Steve see he was hurting? Yeah, Bucky would give him that. Let him help with it? No, not always. Sometimes Bucky shut himself away like a wounded cat until the serum caught up with the damage, and Steve had learned he needed to let him.

He didn't need to _like_ it, but he had to let Bucky have those moment alone.

"If you insist," Bucky said in a voice of longsuffering patience.

But not today. "I do."

"Then knock yourself out."

"Don't do me any favours," Steve said, dry as dust, but he curled his fingers in Bucky's hair and bent his head to kiss him. He could feel Bucky smiling as he returned the kiss, then Steve slipped out of bed. He stretched, maybe making more of a show of it than was strictly necessary since Bucky was watching, wiggled his toes, then snagged his boxers from the floor, pulled them on, and left their room.

When he came back, he had the heat pad tossed over his shoulder, a bottle of liniment in one hand, and two mugs of coffee precariously clutched in the other.

Bucky was half curled on his side, a pillow under his metal elbow, back twisted, obviously trying to get comfortable and failing miserably.

Setting the coffees down on the side-table, Steve sat on the edge of the bed. Bucky stirred, but Steve held him gently in place with one hand. "Nope, stay where you are, thanks."

"Bossy," he said, but he settled.

"Coffee?"

He made grabby fingers with his metal hand and Steve put the coffee in it.

"Here, slurp on that."

He plugged in the heat pad, gulped down some coffee of his own, and then uncapped the liniment. His eyes watered at the fumes and he blinked to clear them. The stuff was custom made, and you had to be careful using it— _thoroughly_ didn't even begin to cover how well you had to wash your hands before touching yourself anywhere sensitive.

As Steve had learned the hard way. He'd thought Bucky was going to choke to death, he'd been laughing so hard.

Steve pulled the sheets off Bucky, letting them pool over his ass while Bucky rolled onto his stomach, and poured liniment into his palm. "Ready?"

Bucky slurped his coffee in an affirmative way, so Steve warmed the liniment between his palms then smoothed them up Bucky's back. Bucky hissed, because it always burned going on, but once Steve started rubbing it in, careful as he passed over the areas that hurt the worse, it would ease out, start smoothing out the pains, the aches. It couldn’t do anything for the bones, the tendons, but the more Bucky relaxed, the better he'd feel.

Already, he was starting to melt under Steve's hands. Steve could feel it, feel the tension easing out of him.

"Don't spill your coffee," he told him, laughing as Bucky gave him the metal finger, and he leaned forward to kiss the back of his head.

Bucky murmured, "Sap," but he tilted his head enough that Steve could twist around and kiss him properly.

"Right back at ya, Buck."

"Hmmph." He settled on the pillow again and closed his eyes as Steve kept working.

Eventually the liniment was absorbed completely into Bucky's skin and he was soft and pliant under his hands. Steve sat back and considered him. "I'm going to get the heat pad. Okay?"

"Yeah. Here." He wiggled the mug. "Take this, will you?"

Steve plucked it out of his hand, set it on the side-table, and lay the now-warm heat pad over Bucky's back. He pulled the sheets up to cover it and added the blanket for good measure, cocooning him in. Steve studied him. He was curled less awkwardly, had stretched out more, was lying more freely. "I'm gonna wash this stuff off my hands."

Bucky flapped a hand at him. "Don’t touch yourself on the way."

"That was one time. One time."

"One time too many," Bucky said around a yawn.

He was asleep when Steve returned, hair over his face, and he didn't stir when Steve came into the room. A warm fierceness sparked through him, lighting him up, because he was the only one who got this. He was the only one Bucky allowed to see him like this: soft, vulnerable. Trusting.

There weren't words for how much Steve loved him.

There were things he could be doing. Things he probably should be doing. Instead, Steve grabbed his now cold coffee off the side-table and carefully eased onto the bed, settling back against the headboard, watching Bucky.

He stirred, woke up enough to say, "What time do we have to be at the thing?"

"Not until tonight. Go to sleep."

Bucky mumbled something unintelligible and dropped off again.

 _The thing_ was some black-tie event where he and Bucky would get paraded around like prize racehorses in front of people who didn't give a damn about anything but being seen seeing them—but it would convince them to open their wallets. Steve couldn't even remember what this one was for. Stuff where they got to make a direct difference, hospital visits and charity events, stuff where they could actually _do_ something, meet the people they were supposed to be helping—those ones were easy to remember. Neither of them minded those. But galas full of the kind of people Tony pretended to be when he _really_ wanted to piss someone off? They blurred together. But he trusted Pepper to make sure the money was still going to important causes, and he and Bucky let themselves be paraded out in fancy dress, Bucky getting a taste of what the USO tours had been like—Steve would have saved him from it if he could, but they wanted Bucky, too.

Bucky was their darling, just like Captain America, the two of them somehow a fairy tale come to life in the eyes of the world. Steve never could have predicted. He didn't think anyone could have predicted it. 

After the fall of SHIELD, after the revelation that it had been so thoroughly infiltrated by the enemy, after the public had begun to truly understand just how close so many people had come to death, people had been scrabbling for something to believe in. Even the most cynical had had their foundations torn right out from underneath them and they were desperate for hope.

And there was Captain America, just like he'd been all those years ago. Even the bad guys had been the same.

Captain America, who had somehow lived up to every piece of propaganda ever floated about him. Who'd proved that every myth accumulated around his memory wasn't just a myth. He'd been near seventy years gone only to rise from the dead to save the world from aliens, then stepped up and took down an entire corrupt government organisation. Saved almost a million lives. 

It had been history repeating, the legacy of Captain America and the Howling Commandos reborn. Literally, because the lost Howling Commando came home.

 _Bucky_ came home. Bucky came home, and Steve had been ready to fight, he'd been ready to run, ready to do whatever it took to keep Bucky safe. He'd been ready for anything.

Or so he'd thought.

The files Natasha had dumped on the internet had been thoroughly dissected; the Winter Soldier was in them. A city full of CCTV cameras in private hands meant footage from Captain America's fight with the Winter Soldier was everywhere online. Trying to take it down was pointless. The moment Steve had seen the Winter Soldier without his mask, the moment he'd know he was _Bucky_ , was preserved forever on grainy dashcam footage. It had been replayed over and over, had countless billions of views, was like goddamn HYDRA: get one link pulled down, ten more went up in its place.

People knew, the country knew: who the Winter Soldier had been and what had been done to him. Only in the vaguest, most basic, way, but they knew. No one knew exactly what had happened on the last helicarrier, but what imagination and need constructed to fill the gap was eerily close to true.

It pushed the Captain America mythos even higher: Captain America was so good, so noble, so strong, he broke through decades of brainwashing to save his friend. The lost Howling Commando, Captain America's childhood friend, _best friends on the school yard and the battlefield_ , threw off decades of torture and brainwashing because they tried to make him kill Captain America.

It was like a fairy tale. It _was_ a fairy tale, and it was a fairy tale people desperately needed to believe in. It gave them hope and faith and rebuilt trust so thoroughly shattered by the broken promise of SHIELD. It spawned memes. It spawned op ed pieces. It prompted official attention from the Army. Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes was no longer missing in action. He'd been a POW. He was not responsible. He was honourably discharged. He became, in the eyes of the world, part of Captain America's legend. He was Bucky, he was the lost Howling Commando finally found, and he was part of the fairy tale.

If that was possible, if he was possible, if _they_ were possible, then anything was.

It was good for the Avengers. It was good for the country. It was good for people to have something to believe in. It hadn't turned out so great for Steve and Bucky. Not that Steve wasn't grateful. It was an outcome he'd never seen coming, and it meant Bucky was safe from all the endless nightmare possibilities Steve's imagination had helpfully come up with.

But Steve had never wanted this for Bucky, this belonging to the world. It was why they'd ended up living at the Tower. It was the one place Steve knew Bucky could have absolute privacy—once Tony had agreed that JARVIS stayed in the elevator, wouldn't monitor their floor. They weren't going to stay here, not forever, but for now it worked.


	2. Chapter 2

Bucky looked good in a tux. No matter where they were going, no matter why, nothing was going to change the fact that Bucky knew he looked damn good in a tux.

He didn't need a mirror to tell him. He had Steve, who was staring at him. Blatantly.

Bucky smoothed down his jacket and gazed at Steve from under his eyelashes. Deliberate. Provocative. "See something you like?"

"I'd show you if we weren't already late."

Bucky grinned at him. He didn't hate these things the way Steve did. He wasn't a fan, but people didn't crowd him, didn't press in on him, didn't _disregard_ him the way they did Steve, like Steve's attention was something they were entitled to.

It was partly the metal arm. It was partly because when they looked at him, Bucky knew that for all the world had decided to embrace him, had decided to turn him and Steve into some kind of fucked up fairy tale, the reality of who he'd been, of what he'd done—it could never be shoved under the carpet. The shadow would always be there. And while he didn't like it, he'd never like it, it gave him breathing space no one gave Steve.

Actually, scratch that—it gave him breathing space no one gave _Captain America_. It's not like any of them gave a damn about Steve.

Steve dragged his eyes away from Bucky and back to the mirror, fussing with his bowtie, frowning as it refused to lie straight.

"Will you let me do that?" Bucky asked.

"Sure you're not just trying to get your hands on me?" Steve asked with a little smirk.

"I'm a multitasker," Bucky replied, taking that as a yes, and he slid in between Steve and the mirror. There was barely space for him, but Steve didn't move and Bucky didn't want him to. It was a little awkward, his elbows bumping the mirror as he pulled the bow tie loose, but Bucky didn't care, not when they were pressed together, body to body, he could feel Steve leaning into him…and he could feel Steve's tension. Steve was damn good, Bucky had to give him that, because Bucky couldn't see one damn sign of it.

He put his hands around Steve's neck, settling the tie into place under his collar, thumb brushing Steve's pulse point, and said, casually, "We don't have to go."

Steve lifted his chin, giving Bucky the access he needed, and, entirely coincidentally Bucky was sure, avoiding his eyes. "Yeah, we do."

He paused, knuckles resting against Steve's throat. "You don't owe them anything."

"Yeah?" He tilted his head down, awkward again, Bucky's knuckles digging in, and he was all challenge. "Neither do you."

It was Bucky's turn to avoid his gaze. He pressed one metal finger under Steve's chin, pushing it back up, and quickly and neatly tied a perfect bow tie. "Not quite the same circumstances, you and me." There was no room to move back and he'd have to push Steve away to put space between them. He didn't, because the last thing he wanted was space, but he curled his hands around Steve's shoulders.

"Bucky."

It never ceased to amaze him how a chest that big, that broad, could say his name so softly. He sighed, smiled ruefully, and looked up. Steve's face was earnest, serious. "It doesn't bug me the way it does you," Bucky said, "and, honestly, if this is what they want from me, they can have it. They could have wanted my head. They could have wanted my blood. Instead, they want me to be part of your legend. They want me to be part of your fairy tale. I can give them that. I just wish you'd let me take some of the weight off you."

"Buck, you don't—"

Both their phones wailed, slicing off Steve's response, and Bucky had never been so happy to hear the Avengers alert before. He wasn't sure he was ready to have this conversation with Steve.

Steve whirled away and Bucky started stripping out of his tux as Steve put his phone on speaker. JARVIS said, "An unidentified being has arrived on Governor's Island."

Steve was half-undressed already, asking, "Has he done anything besides land?"

"Nothing aggressive as of yet, but he's not responding to attempts at communication and readings show signs of interdimensional origin. I'm sending full details through to each of you." Their phones beeped politely.

"Thanks, JARVIS."

"You're welcome, Captain."

Steve hung up the phone and they looked at each other. Steve grinned wryly. "I know I shouldn't, but I'm tempted to go easy on whatever this is just for getting us out of tonight."

"Right there with you," Bucky said as he hauled his uniform out of the closet. "Right there with you."

Steve stared at the ivory spire rising out of Governor's Island, and reconsidered his dislike for fancy galas. It looked like it had been snatched from a storybook and plonked down on the lawns outside Fort Jay.

"Oh, hey, an elf," Clint said, first to spot the figure standing at the base. Head tilted, hands drawing graceful patterns in the air, the figure didn't seem to notice their arrival. That, or he didn't care.

"I doubt he's an elf," Steve said, but Natasha of all people, the one he relied on for common sense, chose that moment to let him down.

"No," she said thoughtfully, "I can see it. He's tall, he's got the pointed ears, the long hair—"

"I don't think that's hair," Steve interjected. "It looks more like tendrils."

"—long hair-like substance," she went on without missing a beat," and he's got the ' _you are all worms beneath me_ ' air down pat."

They all studied the…elf. He was completely ignoring them, but there was a definite hint of superiority there.

"Plus he's got those," Clint dragged his hands down his own hips and made twirly gestures with his fingers, "flowy robes. Says elf to me."

Steve sighed and stared up into the sky, cut his gaze sideways and met Bucky's, who was so obviously trying not to laugh at him he looked like he was about to bust something, then hung his head. "Anyone speak elvish?" Steve asked, resigned, then quickly added, "I swear, Tony, if you make a joke about blue suede shoes…"

"I would never," Tony said in the voice of someone who'd obviously been about to do just that.

"Hey," Steve called to what he now knew was going to forever be an elf, regardless of what it actually was. "I don't suppose you'd like to explain what you're doing here?"

After a long moment, the elf looked up. He didn't speak.

"There's no parking here," Steve added, gesturing at the spire. 

It was hard to read expression on the long, pale face, as if the skin and muscle were somehow frozen in place.

"Too much Botox," Tony muttered, and there was muffled laughter from Sam.

Steve let the silence stretch for a minute. Then another minute. Then he lost patience. "You with the tower. What are you doing here?" He put as much bite into as he could and still pull off semi-polite, semi-diplomatic. It was _possible_ whatever was going on was harmless. _Possible_ , even if he knew in his gut it wasn't likely.

Finally, the elf looked at him. "I've come to collect this planet's reality."

"Excuse me?" 

"It's been touched by the Stone."

"I know I'm probably going to regret asking," Steve said, "but: touched by the Stone?"

"Could be really bad erotica," Tony offered.

 "You think the earth's been getting lucky in her spare time?" Clint asked.

"And this guy wants to collect _that?_ That's nasty," Sam said.

Since the elf was simply staring at them, Steve asked again, even though he really didn't want to, "What does 'touched by the stone' mean?"

"The Space Stone has touched this reality. You called it the Tesseract, which was a grave insult, and you used it here. It tore wormholes in this planet's reality. It left its traces. It made its mark." He tipped his head back, tongue darting out like a snake's. "I can taste it, I can feel it. We can't have the Stone, but we can have everything it's touched. Traces of its power are woven through this planet's reality, making it unique, and I've come to collect it."

The fucking Tesseract. Why did it always come back to the fucking Tesseract? At his shoulder, Bucky stirred and Steve felt his elbow press into his side. Solid. Reassuring. He took a deep breath.

"This reality's not currently available for collection, seeing as we're using it. Can I interest you in a souvenir Statue of Liberty instead? Maybe an I heart New York t-shirt?"

"No."

"No sense of humour," Bucky murmured. "How come they never have a sense of humour?"

"The thing I can't figure out is why so many people want the earth. I mean, have they taken a good look at it lately?" Tony asked.

"You saying we should let him have it?" Clint asked.

"It's not a terrible idea," Natasha offered. "It would give us someone to call when the pipes burst or the neighbours are playing their music too loud."

"Yeah, I'm not sure I want this guy as my landlord," Bucky said, giving the elf a critical once-over. "He looks like the kind of guy who'd bulldoze the place and put up fancy townhouses."

"Gentrify the place?" Sam asked.

"Exactly."

Hard to read or not, Steve would peg the no-expression on the elf's face as bemusement. "Like I said, we're using it, so unique or not, you can't have it."

"You'll only be briefly inconvenienced."

"I hate that," Steve said to Bucky. "I really hate that, because it sounds reasonable, but you know it's not." 

"Want me to ask?"

"Be my guest."

"Hey, Elf Boy, can you expand on that? How come the inconvenience is only going to be brief?"

"When I've finished there won't be a you to be inconvenienced."

"And there we go," Steve said. "It's always the same. Just once, just once, I'd like them to say 'because I'm doing something completely harmless, it'll just take a minute and then I'll be out of your hair'. But no. It's always 'everyone will die', or 'I'm gonna enslave the earth', or 'kneel before me'. Every. Damn. Time." Steve hefted his shield higher. "And every damn time we have to stop you. I'm getting sick of it."

The elf smiled. It held no maliciousness, no hint of malice, nothing predatory in the slightest; it seemed genuine. "I can draw on universes as yet unborn…"  The air, the ground, the sky _rippled_ , waking wrongness in Steve's gut, the earth twisting under their feet as everything shifted, flipping past them like a deck of cards before it stabilised. "…how will you stop me?"

"The same way we stop everyone else."

As Steve spoke, the elf gestured, like he was plucking an apple from a tree, and haze surrounded him. A haze they soon discovered was a forcefield. It was immune to repulsors, Steve's shield, Clint's arrows, Redwing's lasers, Natasha's Bites, Bucky's guns—all of them—and half a dozen different knives. Through it all the elf never flinched, utterly confident in his invulnerability.

But Steve had confidence, too. "Tony."

"On it, Cap."

The elf reached up, repeating the plucking gesture, the air rippled, and they were suddenly standing in a mob of scorpion. Scorpions the size of cattle with gaping mouths where their stingers should be, gaping mouths with dripping fangs and long lashing tongues.

Sam and Tony went high, getting above the mob, Tony's attention focussed on the forcefield, but the tongues shot out, lashing after them. It turned to chaos as they worked to bring them down. Steve's shield surprisingly effective, even if he had to get too close, dodging snapping claws as he cracked carapaces and smashed their hearts. Arrows and bullets and repulsor fire rained down and it wasn't long before the grass was awash with scorpion innards and severed tongues and shards of exoskeleton, the air reeking.

They regrouped, waiting for what came next, because there was always a next, which was when the demons burst out of the ground.

"Where does he get these wonderful toys?" Clint muttered absently as his arrow neatly bisected a towering clawed and horned monstrosity, slicing into the tiny eye in its stomach. It hit the ground, writhing and leaving trails of fire before it finally lay still.

"You're stealing lines from Batman?" Sam asked, dragging a winged creature low enough for Natasha to fry it with her Bites.

"It's not Batman, it's the Joker," Clint protested.

"Semantics, man," Sam replied, dropping the smoking corpse on top of Hawkeye's kill. "It's from the Batmanverse. It's not wrong to say your stealing lines from Batman."

"It's not right, either. Precision's important," Tony added distractedly, hovering high in the air while he worked. 

Steve let the banter flow over and around him, background noise that he'd die before admitting he found comforting, because banter meant everyone was alive. Banter meant they had breath to banter.

He'd still rather have all his toenails pulled out one by one than admit it.

Which meant he had to say, "Could we focus?"

"Come on, Cap. You have to admit I'm right on this one."

"I don't have to admit anything."

Tony made an outraged noise and Steve grinned at Bucky and sent his shield into what obviously couldn’t be a demon, no matter what it looked like.

***

It was demons and then it was creatures made almost entirely of fire, their only physical mass a tiny blob of matter deep inside the flames, and then it was stuffed animals—vicious, killer stuffed animals, blood thirsty and violent, big-eyed and fluffy, in all the colours of the rainbow, each appearing like they'd been pulled from nowhere, and then Tony triumphantly crowed, "Got it."

The haze of the forcefield disappeared, and Steve flung his shield straight for the elf. It smashed into his chest and he staggered backwards, letting out a short keening whine, and turned to run, limping, dragging, obviously injured, into the spire. Bucky took aim, shot him in the leg as he disappeared through the door, a burst of red staining the pristine white of the doorway, and tentacles exploded from the ground, lashing tight around them, dragging Tony and Sam from the sky.

Steve, arm still raised, caught his shield on the rebound, slammed it into the tentacle holding him, again and again, until he sliced through it in an explosion of purple goo. Bucky strangled the one holding him with his metal fingers until it went limp and released him, and they bolted after the elf. Steve paused in the bloodstained doorway, but Sam's voice in his ear said, "Go, get him, we're good."

They followed the blood trail up a long white ramp, slowing as they approached a door.

Steve went through first, shield up, Bucky close behind, gun raised, both ready to move, both ready for anything.

The elf was hunched over a pillar in the centre of the room, blood pouring down his leg, blood staining his teeth and bubbling out of his nose. He tracked their movement as they entered, but beyond that, didn't react.

A moment of silence held them, then the elf asked, "Who are you?" in tones made of equal parts anger and wonder.

Steve didn't look at Bucky. "I'm Captain America. We're the Avengers. We protect the earth from people like you."

"People like me."

"Yeah, people like you. People who think wanting something means they get to have it, people that treat life like collateral damage. People just like you. They keep coming and the earth's still standing."

The elf stared and then, against every expectation, started to laugh, blood bubbling from his mouth, and Steve knew his shield had crushed bone, driven it into lungs and who knew what else. "This should have been easy. This should have been simple. Maybe," he murmured, "taking the time to play was a mistake, but it shouldn't have mattered."

"Didn't you say we were unique? You should have expected things to be different here." Steve said, gentle admonishment that hid his rage at knowing they'd been treated like playthings. "You should always have a backup plan."

The elf's nostrils flared. "We always do."

Faster than thought, the elf's clenched fist shot into the air and he dragged it forward, blood pouring from his ears, his eyes, his nose, and his eyes went white from edge to edge. Bucky fired, bullets ripping through the elf, but it was too late. There was an explosion of light, Steve dragged Bucky close, covering them both with his shield.

The room warped around them as reality _twisted_.

The elf died.

The light faded.


	3. Chapter 3

Steve and Bucky were unconscious, legs tangled together, Bucky lying across Steve, the shield gripped in Steve's hand half-covering their chests.

Time ticked past and Steve stirred. His hand spasmed on the shield and his eyes flew open. They flicked around the room. Nothing had changed, the elf crumpled dead on the floor next to the pillar. Nothing had changed about the room, anyway. Saying nothing had changed couldn't be more wrong. Steve's eyes flicked over Bucky, over himself, and he swallowed hard, then his expression firmed.

"Buck, I need you to wake up and I need you to stay calm."

Without opening his eyes, Bucky replied, "For the record, that's a piss poor way to wake someone up, and an even more piss poor way to keep someone calm."

"Point taken. Still need you to do it, though."

A full body tremor shivered through Bucky and his tail twitched. "And I need you to tell me what the fuck is wrong with me."

Steve managed to strangle his laugh before it got too far along. "Don't know if you'd believe me."

"Steve." Bucky's voice was flat. "What is there about the shit we've been through that makes you think there's anything I wouldn't believe." He paused. "Especially if it's you saying it."

"I dunno. This might be different."

"Just spit it out."

"Right. You know how I sometimes call you a horse's ass?"

"Yeah?"

"It's a hell of a lot more accurate now."

"What the fuck are you—" Bucky's eyes snapped open. "Oh."

"Yeah."

"Why are your feet so fuzzy?"

" _That's_ what you're focussing on?"

"They're really fuzzy; it's hard to look away."

Steve met Bucky's eyes. They were calm, but it was the calm that heralded storms, the calm that came before a bullet ripped through the air, all bared teeth and willpower beyond comprehension.

Bucky dragged his eyes away and heaved himself to his feet, staggering before he got his four legs organised. He stamped them one after another, hooves ringing.

Steve followed, shoving himself up, front first, then back, and his tail lashed, seemingly of its own accord. He looked down at Bucky, eyes travelling over him, and his heart skipped a beat. He felt it, actually felt it falter and pause before it fell back into rhythm.

"Bucky," he said, calm, even, a little soft. Bucky's eyes flicked back. "Your arm."

"What about it?" His eyes were locked onto Steve's face, like he wasn't willing to see anything else.

Instead of answering, Steve reached out and caught Bucky's left hand, wrapped his gloved hand around Bucky's flesh and blood fingers, and Bucky sucked in a breath. Neither spoke.

Bucky's hand spasmed and he clenched Steve's hand hard enough Steve knew he'd bruise. "Are we sure this is happening?" Bucky eventually asked in a low voice.

"No."

 _Back-up plan. He said he had a back-up plan._ Steve looked around the room again. It hadn't changed. The dead elf, who'd sunk in on himself like his bones were melting, blood trickling from every visible orifice, was still very dead.

And they were centaurs. That was the only word for it—maybe not the only word; _fucked up_ were some good words. They were still them down to the waist and then they weren't. They disappeared into fucking horses. Glancing down at himself, Steve saw heavy muscles, thick strong legs, and Bucky hadn't been kidding. His feet…hooves…were barely visible under sweeps of blond hair.

The weirdest part, and he admitted it was a crapshoot at this point for what was going to come out on top of that scale, was they were still wearing their uniforms. And they fit. They fit the _horse_ parts of them. The Kevlar-reinforced ballistic material was closely fitted over their whole bodies, straps over their flanks, across their…whatever the hell you called the space between their front legs—did they have _two_ chests now?—and Bucky had weapons hanging off straps that went under his belly and criss-crossed his…horse back, god he did not have the vocabulary for this.

He looked back at Bucky, at Bucky's left hand, which was flesh and blood.

They _weren't_ the same from the waist up. Bucky's metal arm was _gone_ , torn away from him like it had never existed, and Steve didn't know how to react. It cost him so much, was the source of so much pain, but it was _his._ It was almost worse than their bodies being changed; at least they'd both been through that before.

"Buck?" he said softly and squeezed his hand.

"Yeah. Yeah. I'm here. I'm," he sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly through his nose, "this is fucked up. I've got horse parts. I don't know where my balls are, I don't know where my dick is, they should be right _there_ ," he gestured between his front legs, "and there's no sign of them, and I'm about to lose my shit because my arm's gone."

"Hang on." Steve shifted and leaned down, resting one hand on Bucky's flank and twisting—and this shape was incredibly flexible, more than he'd have expected—to peer under Bucky's belly. "Two balls, one dick. All present and accounted for," he announced when he straightened. "You're wearing some kind of cup though."

Bucky stared at him. After a moment, the corner of his mouth twitched.

Steve caught his left hand again and kissed the back of it. Bucky tasted like gun powder and smoke and the iron tang of blood.

"That's alright then," Bucky said, mouth twitching again. "As long as I know where they are, everything's okay."

"Glad to hear it."

With a sigh, Bucky dropped his forehead to rest on Steve's shoulder and Steve did his best to wrap his arms around him. It was awkward—not because of the new shape, but because they were both in full uniform. Bucky, as always, was bristling with weapons, and there was nothing comfortable about what either of them were wearing. It was still comforting. Bucky turned his face into Steve's neck and breathed in, and Steve tangled one hand in his hair and as they held each other, Steve could feel himself settling. Grounding. He had Bucky. Bucky had him. Everything else they could figure out.

The whine of repulsors and a sudden crash made them lift their heads, but they didn't let go. Given the circumstances, Steve figured Tony would forgive them. A hole had appeared in the side of the room, a crackle over the comms announced them coming back to life—not that they'd registered they were dead—and Tony's voice rang out even as the Iron Man suit appeared in all its vibrant glory, even if its vibrant glory was liberally smeared with purple goo.

"Cap! Bucking Bronco! I was beginning to think we'd lost you." He jetted over to stare down at the elf, who'd sunk in on himself even more. "Wicked witch impression, huh? That's different." He turned, flipped up the faceplate. "You two doing okay? Need a lift out of here or can you walk on your own?"

Steve and Bucky exchanged glances.

"Uh, Tony?" Steve said, but Tony kept going right over the top of him.

"Because last time your hoofies scratched the hell out of my paint. So if we could avoid it, you know, that'd be my preference."

Steve and Bucky both stared at him. They stared at him long enough and hard enough that he trailed off.

"What?"

"Nothing seems strange to you?" Bucky asked.

"You mean apart from the melting dead guy?"

"Yeah, apart from that."

"Should it? Am I missing something?" Blue light engulfed them as Tony scanned the room. "I'm not seeing anything except," his voice took on the tones of deep mourning, "a lot of intriguing electronics behind the walls that have been fried completely to hell."

Steve met Bucky's eyes.

 _What the fuck?_ Bucky's gaze was saying.

 _I don't know,_ Steve's replied. His tail lashed the air, and he cursed it, because it was entirely out of his control. A quick glance at Tony, then he met Bucky's eyes, and saw agreement with his instant decision: _Say nothing until we figure out what the fuck is going on._

"Except for the melting carcass everything seems normal," Tony said. "I'm thinking take that back to the lab for samples. Good idea? Bad idea? Any opinion from the peanut gallery?"

"I'm not carrying it," Bucky said, and Steve could hear the strain of trying to sound normal.

Tony rolled his eyes. "Don't worry, we all remember what happened last time someone asked you to carry something. No one's going to make that mistake again. _I'm not a damn horse,_ " Tony said gruffly, making an over-exaggerated frowny face. "So sensitive. Thought I was gonna have to start calling you an Equine-American."

Steve exchanged another glance with Bucky, which Tony caught, and he waved them off. "Go on, shoo. Science happening. Go get checked over, make you sure you didn't catch hoof and mouth or something."

Normally, Steve wouldn't let something like that pass without comment. Normally, Bucky sure as hell wouldn't have. But normally they didn't have eight legs between them. Steve slid his shield into place on his back, and they Tony to it, following the ramp down.

As soon as they were out of sight, Steve turned off his comm. Bucky did the same.

"Hoof and mouth?" Steve asked.

"Equine-American?" Bucky countered, then tripped over nothing. "How the fuck are these legs supposed to work? How do horses do this?"

"I think you just have to not think about it."

"Sure, that's easy. I'll just ignore these four hooves and these four legs and the fact that I'm a damn centaur," Steve knew what that tone meant; it meant Bucky was hanging on by the skin of his teeth, "and no one seems to find it in the least bit strange."

"Buck." Steve stopped and caught Bucky's arm. Bucky stopped and turned to look at him. "I know. I _know_ ," he softened his grip, turned it into a caress, sliding his hand up to grip the back of Bucky's neck, "but we're still us, we're still together. We'll figure it out."

Bucky's fists clenched. Steve stared at Bucky's left hand, still overwhelmed by it, by the metal arm's absence. A wave of tension rolled through Bucky's body until he was almost shaking under Steve's touch, then he let out an explosive breath and went limp. "Right. You're right." He bowed his head, hair falling over his face, and Steve rubbed soothing circles at the base of his skull. He turned his head, eyes glinting, smile pure mischief. "How do you feel about hung like a horse jokes?"

Inside, Steve wanted to grin, wanted to laugh in absolute satisfaction because Bucky was _incredible_ , but he forced a long-suffering sigh. "You do what you need to do, Bucky."

"See, that takes all the fun out of it." He caught Steve's face between both hands and gave him a long, hard kiss and it was all Steve could do not to pull him back in when he moved away. "Let's go see what else is different. Hey, maybe Sam's an actual bird. Oh, maybe he's a harpy."

"I think harpies were all women."

"That's pretty sexist, Steve."

"Don't blame me, blame mythology."

When they got outside, nothing was different. At least, nothing they could see. Sam wasn't a harpy. Natasha and Clint were the same as they always were. They already knew Tony was the same, unless he was hiding something under the suit. 

Emergency personnel were starting to trickle in, clean-up teams, a few gawkers and bystanders, lined up along the cordons—not many, given they were on an island, and mostly tourists, because New Yorkers as a general rule weren't impressed by much.

Not one person pointed at them and yelled, 'Holy shit, what are those?'.

No one seemed to notice there was anything different.

They drew a little closer together and Bucky brushed his hand over at least three hidden knives.

The quinjet was the same—except for two additional spaces clearly meant for them to strap in as they were _now_ , with padded bars obviously meant to fold down so they could secure themselves in case of a rough ride. 

It was disturbing.

They didn't say anything as they hopped on board. Steve went first. He wasn't having much trouble dealing with the new body—except for his tail, which seemed to do what it wanted—and he heaved himself up, wondering from the way the 'jet rocked slightly underneath him just how much he weighed.

Bucky, with a quick look at Steve, one that said, _Are you sure about this?—_ and Steve wasn't, not entirely, but he wasn't sure what the other option was—gave a subtle nod. Bucky followed, and that same feeling from this morning, that warmth, that fierceness, burst inside him.

They got settled in the spots meant for them, and neither of them relaxed.

"Ready to go, Cap?" It was Clint from the pilot's seat. Natasha was sitting next to him. Sam was stretched out in a seat not far from where he and Bucky were standing, feet crossed, looking tired but satisfied. It was a look Steve was used to seeing. Familiar. Sam insisted he wasn't an Avenger, he persisted in referring to it as _lending a hand_ , but when they were down on people, Sam would step in.

In any other circumstance that oh so familiar look would have been a cue to relax. In any other circumstance, Clint piloting the 'jet, Natasha in the co-pilot's seat, would have been comforting, the after-battle routine of it settling him into stand-down easiness.

Not now. Now, it was too familiar. It was too much the same when everything was different.

He exchanged a look with Bucky and said, "Ready when you are."

They lifted smoothly into the air.

"So we're fighting elves now?" Sam said. "Can we expect ents next? Balrogs?"

"I wouldn't mind taking on a balrog," Clint mused.

"It would eat you alive," Natasha said.

"Hey, I could take a balrog!"

"Maybe a mini-balrog."

"Such confidence in my skills," Clint muttered.

"Maybe I just have a high opinion of balrogs."

"For the record? If there's balrogs, you guys are on your own," Sam said, folding his arms and closing his eyes. "Gandalf barely took one of those things out."

"Oh, please. You'd be here in a heartbeat if someone said balrog," Natasha told him.

Steve let the banter wash over him, too familiar, too _right_ , nails on a chalkboard where before it had been comforting, and shifted his gaze to Bucky. Bucky was watching them intently, like he could see inside them if he just tried hard enough, and Steve knew he was looking for anything off, anything that didn't fit, anything he could grab hold of and say: this, this here is wrong.

There wasn't much time for him to do it in. It wasn't long until they were landing on the roof of the Tower. Avengers Tower. Stark Tower. Call it what you want, and what people called it varied, it was a towering beacon in the lights and dazzle of New York City.

Bucky put his mouth against Steve's ear, made it look like a kiss, whispered, "Think we're still staying here?" while the landing gear deployed, its noise providing some cover.

Steve brushed his lips over Bucky's cheek, nuzzled his neck, and breathed, "Guess we'll find out," against his skin.

"See, that'd be cute and all if I didn't know your sweet nothings tended towards the obscene." Sam was standing by the door, grinning at them. "At least shelve it 'til you get home."

Bucky's grin had way too many teeth, but Steve didn't know if anyone else would see it. "What, don't you want a show?" He settled his hand low on Steve's abdomen.

"Oh my god. No. Just no. I'm out."

Natasha's laughter followed Sam as he jumped out of the 'jet, followed by the woman herself as she said over her shoulder, "If you trash the 'jet, Stark's going to lose his mind."

"Which would be hilarious, so, you know, something to think about," Clint added, following her out.

It left them alone and Bucky's hand fell away. Gradually, with the moment to themselves, they relaxed, leaning into each other. Steve let his head rest on Bucky's shoulder and Bucky's fingers, the fingers of his left hand, and Steve couldn't help the shiver that ran down his spine at how different they felt, curled around his neck. Steve wrapped an arm around Bucky's waist as best he could with them both in uniform, with the shield on his back, and they breathed together, slow and easy.

They were both watchful, both alert, but they could take this moment.

A blast of noise had them both leaping to battle readiness, Steve grasping the shield, Bucky with a knife in his hand. "NO! NO, no no! Do you know how much these things cost? Both of you, get out, you have an entirely perfectly good floor if you want to do things that I frankly don't need to think about. So get out and do them there!" It was Stark's voice, blasting out from every speaker in the 'jet.

"We hear you, Stark." Bucky sheathed his knife.

"Then shoo, out you go."

Even this was familiar, embarrassingly enough. Not deeply familiar, but…it had happened. More than once. Adrenaline had an effect on them both. Give them a close call and the right set of circumstances… They had, once or twice, gotten carried away.

They'd only trashed the 'jet once.

Tony hadn't been pleased.

They each took a deep breath, settling themselves, and leapt out of the 'jet, hitting the roof with a clatter of hooves. It was deserted—no, that wasn't entirely right. There were no people, but there were a half dozen of Stark's robots waiting to deal with the 'jet. They skirted around them and headed for the elevator.

When they got in the elevator, Steve said, "JARVIS? We're ready to head home." At least Tony's outburst had confirmed that, yes, they still lived here. Steve would lay good money on them still being on the same floor. Everything else had been too perfectly the same. Whatever this was, it had gotten everything right so far; Steve couldn’t imagine it would get this wrong. But he didn't know for sure and he didn't want to show their hand, so he'd leave it up to JARVIS.

"Certainly, Captain Rogers."

The elevator doors opened on the same floor they always did.

"Thanks, JARVIS."

"You're welcome."

How it was supposed to work was that once they were off the elevator, JARVIS was supposed to be gone. Emergency monitoring only. That was how it worked, how it had worked, in the real world, where they'd come from, whatever the right way to think about that was.

The same thoughts must have been running through Bucky's head, because he walked forward ten paces, stopped, and said, "JARVIS?"

There was no reply.

"Guess that answers that question," Steve said.

"Maybe."

Steve grimaced, but gave a brief nod, because Bucky was right, but it was the best they could do. It was the best they'd ever been able to do. The building was Stark's second skin and JARVIS his second self, and they'd always had to trust that this floor was allowed to exist outside of it.

They stared at the solid wooden door to their apartment proper like it was unexploded ordinance. Steve stamped his front hoof, tail flicking back and forth. Bucky was completely still.

Time stretched and stretched, and Bucky gave an explosive sigh. "This is stupid."

Steve had to admit it was. Neither of them was suddenly going to develop x-ray vision. He looked down at himself. _Probably_ , he amended.

"What are you expecting to find?" Bucky asked.

"No idea. A stable? Piles of hay?"

"A salt lick?"

Steve snorted, and decided on the spot he was never doing it again. It sounded way too much like a horse. "Guess we should go in and find out."

"After you."

"Right."

Steve cautiously opened the door and found himself…in their apartment. "Huh."

"What?" Bucky called from the hall.

"See for yourself." He walked forward, getting out of the way.

It wasn't identical, there were obvious differences to account for the fact that parts of them were shaped like horses, but it was damn close. The couch was gigantic, circular and flat, easily big enough to fit them both as they were now, the cushions scattered on it a random mix of patterns and colours. The table was taller, to account for their new height, and instead of chairs, there were stools—more than they were used to. "I guess we entertain?"

"Or someone assumed we would," Bucky replied, pushing past him.

Seeing him there, in what might be their home, Steve stopped. Stared. Really _saw_ Bucky. He'd looked at him, back when they'd woken up like this, but he hadn't really _seen_ him.

Even adapted to fit around the shape of a horse, his uniform looked the same, black and strappy and close fitting. Wide straps between his front legs, around his belly and flanks, held it in place and it seemed to be made up of panels, Steve guessed so he could move easily. He'd seen for himself there was a cup protecting his balls. He was wearing one, too; he could tell by the feel. 

Bucky had turned, was looking at him, brow furrowed in concern. "You okay there, Steve?"

"Yeah, just looking at you. Sorry."

"Well, it's something to see, I'll give you that." Bucky tilted his chin towards Steve. "You might want to check out a mirror, though."

Suddenly, he needed to see.

It must have been written on his face, because Bucky said, "Bathroom," in a firm voice.

Steve trotted down the hall, and it was strange, he hadn't thought about _trotting_ , but it was like he'd told Bucky: if you didn't think about it the legs sorted themselves out.

The bathroom was completely different. It was pale greens and light yellows, plants hanging in one corner, and nearly twice the size he remembered. The bathtub was gone and the shower took up almost the entire space, with double shower heads at either end. There was a full-length mirror on the wall, and Steve stopped in front of it to stare at himself.

Even covered by the uniform—and like Bucky's it covered all of him—he could tell he was bigger than Bucky, but he needed to see himself, he needed to see what he looked like.

He dragged off the shield, leaned it against the wall, and started pulling at the uniform, trying to tug it off. The top was easy enough, the same as what he was used to, but his fingers tangled in the straps for the rest.

Bucky was there, catching his hands. "Easy, Steve. Hang on. I've got it."

He waited patiently as Bucky undid the straps, freeing him from his uniform, setting it aside, and then he was naked, apart from the undershirt he wore under the uniform.

"Hey, you're still pretty," Bucky murmured, smiling, his hand at the small of Steve's back.

Steve laughed quietly, partly in disbelief as he studied himself. He was pale grey, dappled with light patches and dark spots, shading to deep grey at his sides and hindquarters, and heavy, muscular, with wide legs. His hooves were nearly twice the size of Bucky's, and Bucky had been right: his feet were very fuzzy. His tail and the fuzzy hair on his legs and around his hooves was as blond as his head.

He pulled his shirt off and ran his fingers over the place where the skin of his abdomen met the short hair of the horse. It was seamless, a soft, near invisible peach fuzz trailing up his ribs. Bucky's fingers covered his, then Bucky ran his hand over Steve's chest and down to where the horse started, except it wasn't the horse, it was him, because he could feel Bucky's touch and it didn't feel any different from how Bucky's touch always felt.

He took a deep breath.

"You okay?" Bucky rested his chin on Steve's shoulder, breath ghosting over Steve's neck.

"Yeah. Sorry, I don't know what that was."

"You needed to see that it was real…however we're defining real right now. I get it. It's okay."

Steve nodded.

"Feel better?"

"A little, actually." He turned his head and nuzzled Bucky's cheek. "Your turn?"

In answer, Bucky held his arms out from his sides in invitation.

Weapons first, and it wasn't the first time he'd removed Bucky's weapons. It would never stop amazing him that Bucky let him. They ended up in a pile on the counter that overflowed to the floor, and then he started on Bucky's uniform. It was as familiar as Steve's own. Even the parts that were entirely new had a familiarity to them, the shape different, the parts they were covering different, but they were similar enough Steve had no trouble getting Bucky naked.

He'd never had any problem getting Bucky naked.

He would have stopped at the long-sleeved shirt, but Bucky shook his head, told him to, "Keep going," so Steve stripped it off him, dropped it on top of their mingled pile of gear. It was automatic afterwards to smooth down Bucky's hair, to run his fingers through it, untangling the snarls he'd caused.

Bucky's eyes glanced back and forth between the mirror and Steve. "Verdict?"

"Still beautiful."

Bucky raised one doubtful eyebrow. From the waist up… Steve's eyes caught on his left shoulder, the smooth skin his mind insisted should be gleaming metal. Apart from his arm, from the waist up he was unchanged. From the waist down he was, like Steve, a horse. Smaller than Steve, shorter, lighter, like he was built for speed and quickness to Steve's brute force, and he was the same colour as his hair, a glossy chestnut brown.

The worst thing—the best thing?—was that he was still Bucky. He _was_ still beautiful. He didn't look like a stitched together creature, two half things shoved into one. He looked complete. The way he stood was still Bucky, even the way he—Steve kind of wanted to take his brain out and slap it silly for this one—even the way he held his tail was entirely Bucky.

"You're still you." It was the only explanation he could offer. "Nothing's gonna change that."

It must have been enough, because after a long, slow beat of silence, Bucky's eyes crinkled.

"Yeah, yeah, don't say it," Steve muttered.

"Don't have to, do I?"

Steve huffed at him and Bucky smacked him with his tail.

"Hey!"

"What?" Steve huffed again and Bucky grinned. "We should shower. We can add actually stinking like a horse to your achievements as Captain America." 

"Right back at you, Buck." Steve leaned down to gather up their gear, intending to go and dump it on the floor in the hall.

"Steve?"

He paused. "Yeah?"

"Quick question."

"What?"

"Do you see a toilet?"

They both looked around the bathroom, which had the giant shower, and the mirror, and the counter with the sink and the cupboard, but no toilet.

"That's not good," Steve said.

"No."

Steve dumped their gear in the hall and they went exploring. They found it in a separate room next to the bathroom. It was partially set into the floor, the bowl deep with high sides and about three times the size of any toilet he'd ever seen. There were water jets and nozzles, and controls on the walls with little pictures, like the world's most advanced bidet.

They both stared at it, then each other, and then Bucky gently closed the door. "Shower."

"Right."

They were both sweaty and grimy, and now that he was thinking about it, Steve was itching in places he'd never itched before. Places that had never existed to itch before.

Bucky made sure Steve's shield, several guns, and a selection of knives were in easy reach before they got in the shower. "Just in case," he said grimly, and Steve nodded. They still didn't know what this was.

The shower floor wasn't tile. It was hard rubber, which made sense. Their hooves would have shattered tile. Steve stared at it, tapping it gently with one hoof. "I don't know if it's better or worse that this place was so obviously made for us like this."

"Too early to tell." The water poured down over them, hot and perfect, and Bucky swung around, hindquarters bumping against the wall, because while it was big enough for two of them, there wasn't a lot of spare room.  "I have a question."

"Just one?"

"One for the moment." He picked up a bar of soap. "How the hell do you wash a horse?"

Steve had absolutely no idea. "Let's worry about what we do know how to wash and hope the rest falls into place."

"You know how to wash?" Bucky grinned impishly and Steve gave him a half-hearted shove. Bucky just laughed at him. After a few minutes of standing under the spray, relaxing in the heat, Bucky said, "I don't know what's stranger, suddenly being half horse, or this." He held out his left arm, palm up, fingers stretched wide.

Steve didn't know what to say. He wasn't sure there was anything he could say. He gently touched Bucky's arm and when Bucky looked up, offered him a reassuring smile. "You're still you."

Bucky visibly shook it off. "Back at you, Steve. We just have to figure out where we are and what the hell's going on."

"And there's better places than the shower to do that."

"Yeah, so let's get clean and get out of here."

They didn't speak again as they scrubbed what Steve was starting to think of as their human halves, letting the water flow over them, washing the soap away, letting it run over their horse halves until the dirt and grime and sweat was gone.

Getting dry was more of a challenge, but after going through every towel, they discovered the jets in the wall, blowing streams of adjustable hot air at just the right height to get their horse parts dry. They exchanged looks but didn't say anything at yet more evidence that this place had been made to accommodate them. 

Just like the bathroom, the kitchen had obviously been custom-built just for them, counters perfectly sized with extra space to give them room.

"Horse parts or not, we're not vegetarians," Steve said, staring into the fridge. _One_ of the fridges, because for some reason there were two, and they were both packed to the gills.

"Thank god. Can you imagine trying to pack the calories we'd need into these bodies as vegetarians?"

Steve looked at him over his shoulder, both eyebrows raised in question.

"Well think about it. We've both got stupid appetites anyway. Now we've got to power all of this," he waved at his lower half, "and we can only do it eating beans and shit? We'd spend half our lives grazing."

It was like Bucky's words suddenly kickstarted his appetite. Steve's stomach growled. He stared down, disturbed, because the sound hadn't come from anywhere near the right spot. "Bucky?"

Bucky gave a little leap, all four feet…hooves, they had _hooves_ , leaving the ground as he landed next to Steve. It had been graceful, elegant, oddly beautiful, and Steve blinked at him before he shook himself out of it.

"No." Bucky's hand was on his arm, squeezing hard, eyes intent. "I'm making a new rule."

"Oh, you are, are you?" He couldn't keep the amusement out of his voice.

"Yeah, and that rule is: _don't think about it_."

He opened his mouth to protest, but Bucky pointed his chin at Steve's belly, his _horse_ belly, where the noise had come from. Steve twisted around to stare at it, then he looked down at his stomach—his human stomach—where the grey fuzz gave way to smooth skin.

His brain screeched to a halt. Did he have _two_ stomachs? Because how would that even work? How could it…

_Nope._

"Not thinking about it," he agreed, resolutely staring back into the fridge. "Good rule. What do you want to eat?"

"Everything."

They demolished a quarter of the contents of the first fridge standing at the counter. When they were done, Bucky put his elbow on the counter and stared thoughtfully into space.

"It tasted the same."

"Yeah."

"It was pretty much the same as what we had in the fridge back home."

"Yeah."

Bucky shifted his gaze to Steve. "Even for us, this is pretty fucking weird."

"Yeah," Steve agreed with a huff of laughter.

"Maybe we'll wake up and everything will be back to normal."

"It's worth a shot."

The detritus from their meal was scattered across the kitchen, but Steve pointed out, "If we wake up in the morning and everything's fixed, cleaning up'd just be a waste of time."

Bucky stopped, eyes narrowed, and pointed at him. "This is the only time you get to use that excuse."

"Whatever you say, Buck."

Their bed had been replaced with a massively oversized, incredibly thick futon mattress—no frame, it was resting on the floor—piled with pillows and blankets. There were low platforms instead of bedside tables, bookshelves they'd never had in their bedroom, even if they owned about half the books, but Bucky's weapons stashes were exactly where he'd left them—minus the ones that had been under the bed.

They shoved a bookshelf in front of the door before they went to bed. It probably wasn't necessary, but it made them both feel better, and that was a good enough reason to do it. With weapons and the shield in easy reach, they stood on either side of the mattress and stared at it.

"So how do we do this?" Steve asked, pondering the logistics.

"You first. I'll fit myself around you." There wasn't a lot of room to argue in Bucky's voice and Steve knew why.  It was too strange, they didn't know enough, the blend of familiar and what had been done to them triggering every watchful instinct Bucky had.

Steve wasn't going to argue with him.

He pushed the blankets and pillows into a haphazard pile and stepped onto the mattress, feeling it shift under his weight, give under his hooves, and he lay down, dropping to his knees first, then folding his hindquarters underneath him, flicking his tail out of the way so it didn't get stuck.

"You comfy like that?" Bucky asked.

"Seems good enough. Gonna want a pile of those pillows to lie on, though." Steve twisted to eye him. "Once you get down here."

"Yeah, yeah, hold your horses." Bucky paused, then added, "Or something."

Steve laughed at him and Bucky scooped a pillow up and tossed it at him.

With some careful manoeuvring, Bucky settled behind him, poking Steve to roll forward so he could tuck under him slightly, and Steve, bulky as he was, settled against Bucky's side. They stretched out among the piled pillows and Bucky snagged a few blankets, dragging them up and over them both, then wrapped his arms around Steve.

In a lifetime of strangeness, it was perhaps the strangest thing Steve had ever experienced, but even with their bodies changed, even with Bucky's left arm flesh and blood, the metal gone, it was still Bucky. It was still Bucky's breath and Bucky's touch, and _Bucky_ , and no amount of strangeness could ever change that.


	4. Chapter 4

Bucky woke, smooth and all at once, into what _could_ have been sensory overload as he silently scanned for danger—could have been, but wasn't, every sense soothed by Steve's presence.

Steve was sleeping peacefully, a warm slumbering bulk against Bucky's side, and Bucky knew, like an article of faith, single tenet of a very personal religion, that Steve only slept like that if he believed Bucky was safe. Bucky trusted that belief. It reached down, spoke to something deep inside him, and he _knew_ he was safe.

Bucky lay back with a small sigh, his mind, not having to immediately focus on keeping him alive, free to find other topics to occupy it. There's wasn’t exactly a shortage to choose from. Given everything that had happened, he was surprised it wasn't spinning in place.

Maybe he should be focussing on the huge mass of unfamiliar body growing out of his waist. Maybe, but he wasn't. Maybe he should be focussing on the complete absence of pain—no searing, shooting agony through his shoulder, up his spine, no clenched muscles and vicious knots drawing and quartering his back—again, maybe he should have been, but he wasn't.

No, what he was focussing on, what he couldn’t seem to drag his attention away from, was his arm. Because it didn't feel like his arm, even if it was flesh and blood like the rest of his body.

Bucky lifted his left hand and held it in front of his face, staring at his fingers. There was enough light that he could tilt them and see a fine red aura where the light shone through the edges of his skin.

He didn't know what to make of how wrong it felt.

 _His_ hand was metal. He couldn't remember what it had felt like to have a hand of skin stretched over bone.

Bucky squeezed his eyes shut. With his vision cut off he could feel his metal arm, a phantom limb of segmented plates, he could hear the whir of it readjusting, the noise an imagined burr in his ears.

He sighed a little as he opened his eyes.

Steve's fur—hair? He had no idea which horses had—was soft against Bucky's skin where it brushed against the curve of Bucky's human ribs. After that Steve was lying against the horse. He could still feel Steve, but there was no brush of fur against skin because he was covered in fur of his own. Unless it was hair. He made a mental note to look it up, knowing he was deliberately allowing himself to be distracted by things that didn't matter.

He let his gaze shift between his left hand and Steve, then deliberately touched the fingers to Steve's skin, pressing them lightly against his jaw.

Steve shifted automatically, tilting his head back, exposing his throat.

Bucky's heart clenched. Steve was always making himself vulnerable. No question. No hesitation. Total trust, his defences non-existent. That moment on the helicarrier replaying in endless tiny moments. Bucky wasn't sure Steve even knew he was doing it; it was just who Steve was, _how_ Steve was, for him.

Gently, he let his fingers trail down Steve's neck, feeling his pulse beat against his fingertips, and it was strange and wrong, because he _shouldn’t_ be able to feel it. Not with this hand.

He had to pull it away.

Steve made a tiny noise of protest and Bucky soothed him with meaningless, reassuring noise while he stared at the hand that wasn't his. Steve subsided and Bucky let himself fall back on the pile of pillows. This body wasn't the easiest thing to lie around with—it was too big for one—but the pillows helped.

They had to figure out what this was. He wanted his body back, but he wanted his arm back more. He needed his arm. HYDRA had shoved it into his body to make him a better killer, a better weapon. They'd done it with no regard for his comfort and they hadn't given a damn about the pain. They'd trusted Zola's serum to repair the damage it caused—and they'd been right, it had worked, it still worked, over and over again; they'd designed him well—and he was still paying for that. But the pain didn't matter. HYDRA had given him the arm to make him a weapon, but that didn't matter either. It was his now, not HYDRA's. He'd taken it, taken it from HYDRA and turned it into something good. He was using it to start making up for everything he'd done. Maybe he'd been nothing but a weapon in HYDRA's hands, HYDRA pulling his trigger, maybe he wasn't responsible, but that didn't matter. _Someone_ had to balance the scales and it's not like there was anyone else to do it.

Waking up without pain, it was a miracle, he wasn't gonna lie, but he needed his arm and that meant taking everything that came with it. Which meant they had to figure out what had landed them like this, they had to figure out what _this_ was or if it was even happening at all. For all he knew they might be lying unconscious while the elf fucked with their brains.

He sighed again, staring up at the ceiling, scratched the place where skin faded into fur—or possibly hair—then shifted so he could wrap his arms around Steve, secretly, selfishly glad he wasn't alone.

Steve didn't wake up slow. He went from sound asleep to wide awake in the space between heartbeats. He didn't move. He didn't react. He didn't open his eyes or so much as twitch.

Bucky still knew he was awake. "It's clear," he said, voice fond.

Steve relaxed. _All of him_ relaxed, it flowed through him like a warm wave, down the long length of his body, into his four legs, sliding into his tail—which wanted to twitch, wanted to lash the air, like it resented the very concept of relaxation. He had a sense of his body, was aware of it in a way he hadn't been yesterday, like his mind had settled into it overnight.

He could feel Bucky against him. He was lying against Bucky's side, Bucky's arms around his shoulders, Bucky's heart beating under his ear—and was it stronger? Slower? He wasn't sure—Bucky's four legs surrounding him, because Steve's were folded up tight while Bucky's were sprawled wide. He could see Bucky's hooves, neat and compact and tidy. Steve uncurled his front legs and stretched, then stared at them critically.

"Why _are_ my feet so fuzzy?"

Bucky laughed, and Steve could feel the vibrations in Bucky's chest, in Bucky's belly, see his tail twitch. " _That's_ what you're focussing on?"

"They're really fuzzy. It's hard to look away."

"We could shave them. I saw some clippers in the bathroom."

"No!" Steve folded his legs, tucked his hooves protectively against his belly. "No, I wasn't complaining."

"You sounded like you were complaining."

"I wasn't." Steve mock-glared over his shoulder. "Stay away from my fluff."

Bucky's fingers ran through his hair. "Okay, no clippers."

Steve mumbled in contentment, because he'd never been able to resist Bucky's touch, like Bucky was hardwired into him. He felt himself start to drift a little, falling into a half-doze, floating on the gentle waves of Bucky sliding his fingers through his hair. Eventually Bucky let his fingers trail down Steve's neck, over his shoulder, down his side, then tentatively stroked them across the peach-fuzz covering Steve's abdomen. He paused, like he was waiting, and Steve surfaced enough to nod, so Bucky brushed his fingers over the short hair on Steve's lower shoulder. "It's soft."

"Feels nice."

They both sounded hesitant. They both sounded surprised.

Bucky kept going, stroking across the soft hair over Steve's lower ribs, moving back up and over Steve's abdomen, running his fingers down the full length of his spine, then playfully tugged Steve's tail.

It jerked and flicked up to smack Bucky right in the face.

"Hey!" Bucky grabbed it and tugged it back down.

"Totally out of my control."

Bucky made a noise of extreme doubt.

Steve flashed him a grin. He felt warm all over and he tilted his head to give Bucky a quick kiss. "It's right, though. We should get up."

"You've got a kitchen to clean, since we didn't magically get fixed overnight."

"No point until breakfast is over."

Bucky heaved himself up, sending Steve rolling, and stood looking down at him with his arms folded. "Your life's just a never-ending quest to get out of washing dishes, isn't it?"

"Maybe. Maybe not."

"I think I'm starting to figure out what happened."

"I did not get us turned into centaurs to get out of washing the dishes."

"You sure about that, Steve?"

Steve heaved himself up, tail flicking. "Haven't you read the history books? I'm a master tactician. If I'd planned this, it would've worked."

Bucky paused in shoving the shelf away from the door to stare at him in disbelief. "Just keep telling yourself that."

Bucky made him wash the dishes while he put breakfast together, which Steve thought was pointless—they'd just have to wash them again after breakfast, why not wait and do them all at once?—but he'd learned not to argue when Bucky had that look in his eyes.

As he washed, he watched Bucky move around the kitchen. Bucky was moving easily, freely. He did burn himself when he forgot he needed an oven mitt to pull the hot pan out of the oven, but other than that—he was in no pain.

After a fight like yesterday's, Bucky should have woken up in agony and it could take him days to recover. Steve knew Bucky's body like he knew his own—and maybe it was half horse at the moment, but he still knew _Bucky_ —and there was no pain.

The constant cycle—the damage caused by the arm, the pain caused by the damage, the wait for it to be healed by the serum—that had been his almost constant companion? It didn't exist here.

For the first time since Steve had lost him… No. Maybe for the first time since the night of the World's Fair he was seeing a Bucky where nothing hurt.

Steve stood with his hands in the soapy water and drank him in. Watched him move and watched him twist and stretch and watched him burn himself on a pan and curse a blue streak and watched him and watched him and at some point he stopped registering that part of him was a horse, because all he could see was Bucky. All he could see was that Bucky didn't hurt.

"Everything okay there?" Bucky asked. Cautiously, like he could tell something was up.

Steve didn't know what to say. He didn't know how to answer around the lump in his throat. "Fine, Buck," he managed. "Everything's fine."

"If you say so." The corner of his mouth quirked, and he got that little crinkle at the corner of his eyes that said, _Steve Rogers, you're full of shit, but I'm gonna let you have this one._ "Here." He slid an omelette onto a plate and added a pile of pancakes from the stack on the counter. "Dry your hands and eat." 

He did as he was told, because he was starving again, and because it would keep him from staring at Bucky.

"You still have to finish the dishes, though."

"Yes, Buck."

"And wash the new ones."

"Yes, Buck," he said and smiled around a bite of pancake.

"I've got a question," Bucky said later.

"Another one?" Steve said, and ducked to avoid the dish towel Bucky chucked at his head.

"Yes, another one."

"Why do you keep asking me? I'm as clueless as you are."

"You see anyone else to ask?"

Steve nodded to concede the point. "What's your question?"

"What are we supposed to do about our balls?"

Steve choked on nothing and swallowed his laugh. "Can I get some context on that?"

Bucky gave him a look a nun would have found overly repressive, but there was a glint in his eyes. "Why, Steve, whatever could you be thinking?" he asked. "I meant, when we go out. It's not like we can wear pants."

"True."

"But there's a whole visible dick and balls situation going on back there."

This was not a conversation he'd ever imagined having, but in for a penny, in for a pound. "Technically, our dicks aren't visible." Bucky raised an eyebrow. "They aren't, they're hidden."

Now it was Bucky's turn to concede the point. "Yeah, okay. But there's still the balls problem."

Steve gave it some thought, then said, "You check the closet, I'm gonna find my phone."

A few minutes later, they reconvened in the living room. "There's no pants or anything even resembling pants in our closet, so I'm guessing it's not a problem…" He trailed off, because Steve was holding his phone, wearing a strange, half-lost expression. "Steve?"

Steve didn't look up. "The photos are the same."

Bucky crowded close to him and Steve tilted the phone so he could see, started swiping through the pictures.

"See? They're practically identical to the ones I took."

"Except we look like this in them."

"Except for that. But see, here's the ones from Sam's birthday." He lifted his head to meet Bucky's gaze. "I don't understand what's happening. How can they be the same?"

"I don't fucking know. That's what we need to figure out. But we do know one thing." He pointed at a group shot. "No pants."

Steve laughed softly. "True." 

"But look how neatly we hold our tails."

"I guess that solves the problem." Steve set the phone down. "What do you want to do?"

"My gut says say nothing until we have more intel."

Steve's gut was saying the same thing. "Agreed. Say nothing, go along with this as if it's real, see what we can find out, decide what we do from there."

"Right." Bucky stretched, arms high over his head, shook himself all over, then cracked his knuckles, like he was gearing up for a fight. "Let's see what the internet's got for us."

They made themselves comfortable on the gigantic couch, each with their tablets and started researching themselves.

What they found made no sense. It was consistent with everything they'd experienced so far, but it made no sense.

"How could I be an assassin if I was a fucking centaur?!" It was an exasperated explosion of sound, and Steve looked up from what he was reading.

"If they kept you out of cities?" Steve said after a moment's thought. "Pretty easily. You hear hoofbeats, you don't expect zebras and you sure as hell don't expect an assassin. You'd be your own transportation, you can run faster than a train, a little bit of camouflage and anyone who saw you would think you were a person riding a horse. Hell, probably even without the camouflage. People are damn good at fooling themselves." He didn't add, _Or you just killed anyone who saw you_.

Bucky blinked at him. "Just come up with that now, did you?"

Steve shrugged.

"Huh. Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Not sure what explains not having the missing arm."

"I think I've got that one covered." Steve stared at nothing. "You didn't fall into the ravine. You fell into a river."

Bucky put his tablet down. "Steve?"

"According to Wikipedia, the serum changed me into a centaur right away. What Zola gave you, it was different. It took longer." He rubbed his flank. "Can't zipline onto a train like this, so the location changed. You and me, we got on a different way. Remember all those westerns where trains got robbed by guys on horseback?"

"You're kidding."

Steve glanced at him.

"I don't even know how to ride a horse."

"Apparently that didn't matter. Things played out about the same, just not as deep in the mountains. I still couldn't save you. I still let you fall. You just fell… different. Not as far. Into a river and it carried you away."

"And nothing's changed about that." Bucky's grip was hard when it wrapped around Steve's arm. Almost as hard as if it had still been metal, like the ghost of it was still there. "You hear me?"

"I just—" Steve made a helpless gesture with the tablet as he met Bucky's eyes. There was no give in them. Steve hadn't been expecting to find any. He sighed and slumped a little, and the grip on his arm softened, became something like a caress. "I know, Buck. But if they were gonna change things, you think they could have changed that."

"I'm getting the feeling that's not how this works. Whatever's going on, we're the only thing different. We're the only things that really changed, at least as much as it could manage." Suddenly Bucky broke into a grin. "Are there pictures?"

"What?"

"Pictures. Of me riding you into battle like some kind of knight."

Steve eyed him. "I don't remember taking photos being much of a priority in the middle of a mission."

"That's a no?"

"That's a no."

"Damn it." Bucky drummed his fingers on his foreleg. "Any artists' impressions?" Bucky's eyes lit up as Steve pulled his tablet closer, hugging it protectively against his chest. "There _are_. This I have to see."

With a long suffering sigh, Steve tapped to bring it up, then handed it over.

"This is amazing," Bucky murmured. "I don't understand why this isn't my wallpaper. I don't understand why this isn't framed on our wall."

Steve knew what Bucky was seeing, because he'd stared at it for a good five minutes before closing out of the page. It was as ridiculous as everything else: he was in his Captain America uniform from the War, shield raised as he reared, half-silhouetted against the setting sun. Bucky was on his back, one hand grasping the shield harness, the other brandishing his rifle, his blue coat flapping in the breeze. Steve was saluting with his free hand. They were both staring forward, heads held high, wearing what Steve was sure the artist had intended to be expressions of heroic patriotism, but Steve thought they looked constipated.

"Because we have taste?" Steve said dryly.

"Oh, that got changed along with you turning into a centaur?"

Steve snatched his tablet back and Bucky laughed at him, so Steve swatted him with his tail.

"The thing I can't figure out is why it took me so long to turn into a centaur."

"I guess," Steve ventured, "because Hydra was using a, a knock-off of what Erskine had. It took time, or they gave you more after they got hold of you. I don't know. All this stuff about us, I mean, the Smithsonian's got an interactive page where you can see what it's like to _live in the hooves of Captain America_ , and no one's talking about _why_ we got turned us into this. We're the only two centaurs in New York, hell, the only two centaurs in the world, and it's like the whole world just accepts it like it's something normal."

"And none of it matters." Bucky's tail lashed back and forth. "Because all of this is bullshit."

"Plus there's that."

"So what we've figured out is that everything's basically the same except we're part horse, which no one seems to have a decent explanation for, but everyone just accepts, and our lives are completely set up for us being that way."

"Yeah."

Bucky went quiet and he rubbed the fingers of his left hand along the edge of his tablet. "Are you getting a bad feeling or is it just me?"

"You mean besides the one I got when we woke up as centaurs?"

"Yeah, besides that."

"No, Buck, it's not just you. This is all too perfect. There's another shoe coming and I feel like it's gonna crush us flat."

"It can try." Bucky smile was all teeth, and Steve nodded once. Firm. Resolute. It could try. The world had been trying to crush them flat since the day they'd met and maybe it'd come close a time or two, but it'd never quite succeeded.

It sure as shit wasn't going to manage it now.

Eventually Bucky suggested venturing up to the communal floor of the tower. He wasn't sure they'd find anyone there, since it'd always been touch and go before. None of the Avengers were huge on group hug, touchy feely togetherness.

They made an effort, they were a team, they had to function as a team, they had to trust each other, they had to know they could rely on each other, but they all had their own lives to live and they didn't live them in each other's pockets.

Sam was a bit different, not being an Avenger (as he often pointed out), so it wasn't quite a surprise to find him, feet up on a coffee table, watching TV.

Bucky drifted around the edges of the room, leaving Steve to do the talking. He didn't trust any of this, not really, even if it all seemed normal.

He didn't trust it because it seemed normal.

Until they knew more, until they had something solid, they weren't saying anything, not even to Sam.

He mentally ran through his knives, their presence a comfort, and when Sam gave him a curious but friendly look, he managed to return it with a half-way friendly look of his own. It seemed to satisfy him, and he switched his attention back to Steve.

Who was giving the low, gigantic couch, practically a twin of the one in their apartment, the hairy eyeball.

"Is there a problem with the couch?" Sam asked. 

"No," Steve replied.

"I only ask 'cause you're looking at it like it insulted your honour, and if you're gonna challenge it to a duel, give me fair warning, will you? I want to get my phone."

Steve actually laughed at that, some of the tension easing out of him. Sam had always had that effect on Steve. It used to make something inside Bucky want to bare teeth and snarl, even if he'd never let it out, but that had been a long time ago. Sam was good. Sam was good for Steve. In his better moments, Bucky could even admit Sam was good for him, could even admit he liked Sam—even if he was nine different kinds of pain in the ass.

"I'll be sure to let you know," Steve said.

Sam was studying Steve, and his eyes flicked over to Bucky. Bucky couldn't help tensing a little, bracing himself, one front hoof scraping the carpet, and Sam's eyes sharpened.

"Not to go all mother hen on you, but is everything all right? You both seem a little…off."

"Yeah, we're fine."

"Good, that means you can come running with me tomorrow. I'll forgive being stood up once, but twice? With no notice? A man's gonna develop a complex."

When Sam was in town, _not_ being an Avenger because he was only lending a hand, they went running in the mornings. Why Sam wanted to was beyond Bucky, maybe he had masochistic tendencies, but it was what they did. This morning they hadn't even thought about it, but in their defence they'd had a lot on their mind.

Looked like that was the same, too.

"Running?" Bucky asked, incredibly casual.

"Yes, running. Why, did you hit your head or something?" Sam sat up straight and stared at him. "Seriously, what is up with you two? You're both acting weird. Weirder than usual, I mean. It's not like Barnes there is ever what you'd call normal."

Bucky gave him the finger, an automatic reaction on par with breathing, and Sam grinned. "There we go, that's more like it. Starting to think you'd been possessed or something."

When they were back in their apartment, Steve turned to Bucky and said, "Sam seems like Sam," and he couldn't keep the relief out of his voice. 

He could hear an echo of it as Bucky said, "Hard to fake that level of annoying."

Steve gave him a not-even-slightly serious look of disapproval that Bucky ignored, and Steve could tell he had something else on his mind. Bucky frowned thoughtfully down at himself. "If we're going running in the morning, we should figure out what these bodies can do." He looked up at Steve. "We need to know anyway, in case we need to use them."

"Yeah." Steve considered his hooves, lifted them one after the other, the flowing blond hair around each hoof rippling. "Last time I spent a lot of time slipping in the street. Crashed right through a plate glass window." He tilted his head to look at Bucky, who was watching him, a strange expression on his face. "Don't really want to repeat that."

"Last time."

"Yeah."

"When the Army gave you the serum."

Steve didn't respond, not with words, just offered Bucky a half-smile. It wasn't something they'd ever talked about.

Bucky's gaze drifted sideways, so he wasn't quite looking at Steve, and his voice was deliberately casual as he said, "It was slower for me. I had time to start getting used to it, walking across Austria after you got me out."

Steve's heart stopped. Bucky didn't talk about this. He'd never talked about this. Steve didn't know, had never known, if Bucky even remembered that time. He pressed his lips together, afraid if he said anything Bucky would stop talking.

"I knew something was wrong even then, even before I got a chance to test it out. Knew something was different. Knew I was different. My body wasn't the same. I could feel it changing. What Zola did to me," he met Steve's gaze, a fleeting, searching glance, then looked away, "I knew it was permanent even then."

He fell silent and still Steve said nothing. Barely even breathed.

"Then they got their hands on me and I didn't know much of anything after that."

Bucky held out both his hands, turned his left one over and back, closed it into a fist, then shook his whole body, right down to his tail, and the fine hairs brushed across Steve's flank.

"But hey, at least we've had practice." His smile was wry, inviting Steve to join him, and Steve couldn't resist the invitation.

"There is that."

Bucky bumped into him, shoved him, shoulder and hip, flicked him with his tail. "And I want to see what these bodies can do. I don't want to be surprised. And I sure as hell don't want to fall through a window," he added, giving Steve a look of disdain.

"That was one time. Once."

"Uh huh. Let's keep it that way."

Steve huffed at him and once they were in the hall he stretched out, breaking into a trot, but Bucky leapt forward, passing him, and they raced for the elevator, sliding to a stop in front of the doors at the same time, Steve slapping them a fraction of a second before Bucky.

Bucky glared and pressed the button while Steve gave him a smug look.

The training rooms were deserted, and a glance around didn't show any changes.

Bucky trotted over to the mats and Steve joined him, shifting to get the feel of them under his hooves.

"So how do you want to do this?" Steve asked.

"Start and see what happens? No kicking me in the head," Bucky warned.

"Buddy, who'd notice?"

Bucky grinned and motioned Steve to come closer.

Neither of them made a move at first, just shifted and twisted, getting the feel of their bodies, finding their balance, watching each other. Cautious. Careful.

When they finally moved, they moved together, lunging forward, power and speed, tentative at first, but it faded into strike and block and Steve reared, using the weight of his new body to drive a strike straight down…

He pulled it at the last second before he took Bucky's head off.

It was a heartbeat's pause and they locked eyes, because they'd both expected Bucky's metal arm to block it. They'd both forgotten Bucky's arm was gone.

It was only a heartbeat before Bucky was lunging forward, hands and hooves and body slamming into Steve, locking him up, grappling him, and even with Steve's extra size he had to work to break free.

Steve spun, letting his body guide him, letting instinct take hold, and lashed out with his rear hooves. They didn't make contact. He'd known they wouldn't, Bucky had already been moving, leaping straight up in the air, all four hooves tucked under his body, and he grabbed Steve's back legs, yanking, and they both went down, twisting, and hit hard on their sides.

Steve rolled over completely and let momentum carry him back up, leaping away in a bound that would have done a deer proud while Bucky heaved himself up to bound after him. Steve spun to face him, rearing and lashing out with his front hooves while he wished for his shield. Bucky met him, grinning, and Steve knew he was wishing for his blunt practice knives.

They both hit the ground, spun away, spun back and stopped, breathing hard. Bucky half-reared, hit the ground, and kicked out with his back legs, his grin more than a little bloodthirsty. The mats were torn where their hooves had dug in, Steve could feel blood trickling down his flank where Bucky had got him, there were bruises rising across Bucky's cheek, but he couldn't help grinning back.

That had been good. That had been better than good. Once they'd let go, stopped thinking, let their _bodies_ go, because their bodies knew how to move, they knew how to fight—and that was a whole new level of disturbing Steve wasn't sure he wanted to think about—it had been incredible.

It had been a long time since they'd gone all out like that. A long time since they'd let themselves go, because every time they did, it cost Bucky pain. And Bucky was willing to pay it, he hated when Steve coddled him, and so Steve sparred with him, knowing it would end up with Bucky hurting, but they'd just gone all out and Bucky didn't hurt one damn bit—apart from what Steve had caused directly.

"Yeah?" Bucky asked, a whole world of emotion wrapped up in that one word.

"Yeah," Steve said, eyes alight, because Bucky wasn't hurting, Bucky was raring for more, and right now he didn't give a damn what body he was in. "Think you can do it again?"

"Think you can keep up?"

They didn't trash the training room, not completely. It was close, but it wasn't any worse than they'd done before. It's what the training rooms were for.

They were both bleeding, both bruised, by the time they were done, but it was good bruised, good bleeding, and they'd sunk even more deeply into their bodies.

When they got back to their floor, they went straight for the kitchen, because they were both starving. Gross, sweaty, hair plastered to their sides, desperately in need of a shower, but food took precedence. They stripped off their shirts, which helped, and didn't bother putting new ones on while they unloaded the fridge onto the counter.

Steve stood beside Bucky while he cooked, lower shoulder pressed against his belly, and ran his hand over Bucky's left shoulder, tracing his shoulder blade, his spine, down the line of his ribs.

Bucky glanced back, asking a silent question.

Steve shook his head, but Bucky quirked an eyebrow and Steve sighed quietly. "You don't hurt," he explained.

"Are you starting that again?"

"No, I'm not. I know how you feel about it. It's just," he wrapped his hand around the curve of Bucky's ribs, just brushing the fuzz at the change from hair to skin, "you don't hurt."

Bucky's expression softened. "Yeah, Steve, I don't hurt."

He let his forehead rest against the back of Bucky's head, breathing him in. He smelled like sweat and Bucky and something new, a musky scent that must be the horse; it wasn't bad, just different. It was good to have that solid reminder that they were different, that things were different, when almost everything else around them was saying nothing had changed.

Eventually, Bucky elbowed him.

"Come on, food's done." He dished it onto two plates and slid one over to Steve. "Eat."

They ate, and then they ate more, and then Bucky poked Steve and Steve made them a second meal, because these bodies needed a lot of food and Bucky pointedly informed him he wasn't doing all the cooking.

When they went to bed that night, Steve curled around Bucky as best he could. It wasn't the same, he couldn't spoon around him and pull him into the curve of his body, but Bucky tucked his legs underneath him and nestled against Steve's belly, let Steve wrap his arms around his chest and hang on.

With Bucky warm and solid against him, Steve lay awake, staring up at the ceiling.

His mind was a jumble, a tangle, a snarl of emotions and memories, Bucky the only clean, clear thing among them. He ran his hand down Bucky's body, from his left shoulder, down his side, across his lower shoulder, and followed the line of his belly, the hair soft and silken under his palm.

Just like had happened to Steve all those decades ago, Bucky didn't hurt anymore.

Steve remembered stepping out of the Vita-Ray machine and the overwhelming, unbelievable sensation of feeling no pain.

In those first moments before he'd opened his eyes, he'd thought he'd died. He'd thought he must have, because back then that was the only way he could imagine not being in pain anymore. He'd though he'd died and gone to heaven and that was his reward.

Steve wondered if that's what it was like for Bucky. He'd barely been willing to admit it hurt in the first place; Steve was shocked he'd been willing to admit it had stopped, but his words were replaying themselves in Steve's mind: _Yeah, Steve, I don't hurt._

_I don't hurt._

Whatever this was, at least they were getting one good thing out of it.

 


	5. Chapter 5

Bucky woke up lying across Steve, who was flat on his side, sprawled out like a dead thing.

Drooling.

Some things didn't change. Bucky watched him fondly, then poked him in the ribs, just above the fuzz, right where Bucky knew he was ticklish, and launched himself off the bed before Steve could retaliate.

This situation was forty-seven different kinds of fucked up, but these bodies were fast.

Steve stared at him in woeful betrayal, hair sticking up everywhere, tail flicking back and forth, and Bucky grinned at him.

"Running, remember?"

As the sleep gradually faded from Steve's eyes it was replaced with a moment of something deep, something serious, and Bucky shifted, stamping his hooves, but it was gone before he had to acknowledge it.

"I remember," Steve said, yawning as he hauled himself off the bed.

Steve pulled on his his usual too-tight t-shirt, but Bucky, after some rummaging around in the closet, found straps and webbing with Velcro fasteners and knew instantly what they were. "This is exactly what I'd set up for concealing weapons on a centaur." Steve gave him a look. "I know, add it to the list of things I never thought I'd say."

One went around his waist, lying flat against his stomach, and gave him a gun at the small of his human back, concealed by the loose, light shirt he pulled over his t-shirt. Another went around his belly, the webbing spreading wide to let him snug it tight over his back, and held half a dozen flat throwing knives concealed on each side. There were two custom fitted holsters that strapped around each front leg, just above his hooves, and looked like support bandages, but each held a wicked knife.

"Happy?" Steve asked dryly.

"Be happier if you had something, but this'll have to do."

They found Sam downstairs, waiting in the usual place. He lifted a hand in greeting, then used it to cover a yawn before heading out towards the street.

The sun was barely up, but Bucky knew there'd be people out and about. It was New York, there were always people, and Bucky figured this was going to be interesting.

It was, but not in the way he'd been thinking.

Granted, New Yorkers had a reputation for taking things in their stride—if _disinterested_ was an Olympic sport, they'd take the gold every time—but even they should have reacted to two centaurs walking down the sidewalk.

Some of them, anyway.

They didn't. There was no reaction beyond a couple of friendly nods.

That meant their presence wasn't a surprise to anyone who saw them. If they did run on the regular with Sam, that made sense. Most people out at this hour of the morning were the kind of people with routines.

It meant they were normal.

It meant they fit in.

A chill went down Bucky's spine. 

It didn't take long to reach the park, and Sam stopped, stretched, then jogged onto the trail. Bucky and Steve trotted after him.

Sam stopped dead, hands on his hips, and stared at them. "Okay, what the hell's going on?"

"What?" Steve asked.

"You never do this."

"What?" Steve repeated.

"This." Sam waved a hand, indicating the space between them. "Stay with me. You two always tear off and wear yourselves out, and then you come back when you've gotten all the bullshit out of your system." His eyes narrowed. "So what's going on."

After the briefest moment of hesitation, Bucky batted his eyelashes. Sam took an involuntary step back, face twisted in an expression of _what the hell?_ "Didn't you say we'd stood you up?"

"Yeah." Steve leapt in. "We didn't want you feeling alone."

"Left out."

"Abandoned."

"We'll never leave your side." Bucky was grinning now, getting into it, and Steve was fighting back a smile.

"Riiiiight. Well, I'm all cured. And I'm going to go run over there. Alone, while, like I said, you two get the bullshit out of your system. _All_ the bullshit." Sam started jogging backwards. "Until then, you stay on your side of the park and I'll stay on mine."

"Sam, I'm crushed!" Bucky called after him.

"Don't you love us anymore?" Steve added, and got a finger in response as Sam turned and started running in earnest.

"Guess he doesn't love us," Bucky said.

Steve was staring after Sam, a distant expression on his face. "It feels strange lying to Sam."

"It's not lying. We're just not sharing." Steve gave him a _really?_ look. "If we decide to tell, when we decide to tell, we'll tell Sam first. But I'm not ready yet. Are you?"

Steve's expression went hard, and he shook his head.

"Look, we're supposed to be running, so let's run. I don't know about you, but I could use it." He could feel the need to move like an itch under his skin.

"Race you around," Steve took off, "the park!" he called over his shoulder.

"You lousy cheater!" Bucky yelled after him, but Steve just laughed, the wind snatching the sound from his mouth.

Bucky raced after him. His hooves thumped the ground, the impact resonating up through his legs, and he drove himself faster, harder, felt the speed sliding through his veins, the wind whipping through his hair, and he arched his tail, let it wave like a banner, like a challenge, as he caught up with Steve. He shoved him, hard enough to make him stumble, and Steve leapt forward, spun to rear in Bucky's face, forcing him to break stride, and then they were racing together, matching each other stride for stride. The city whipped past, the trees, the faces of people, but no one was staring, no one seemed surprised, a few looked downright irritated.

Bucky's heart was pounding, he was losing himself in the moment, in the movement, in Steve by his side, matching him stride for stride, it was echoed in Steve's face, in his body, in the way he was moved.

Eventually, they slowed. They did so reluctantly, panting for breath, sides heaving, and Bucky couldn't keep the grin off his face. He was pretty sure it matched the one on Steve's.

"Holy shit," Bucky whispered, almost reverent, because he didn't have words for how that had felt. It was like this body was made to run.

"I know," Steve said, just as softly.

His skin shivered and he bumped against Steve's side. "Again? Or go pester Sam?"

"Pester Sam," Steve said after considering it, and they trotted off.

Sam was running smoothly on the other side of the park and he didn't react as they bracketed him.

"Get it out of your system?" Sam asked.

"Mostly," Steve said.

"Mostly," Sam replied. "Oh goody. That doesn't fill with me dread or anything." He sped up, pace a little too fast for them to trot comfortably, a little too slow for them to canter, and they broke into something awkwardly half-way between.

Sam grinned and kept it up, obviously knowing exactly what he was doing.

Bucky, annoyed, put on some speed of his own and started cantering circles around Sam and Steve, leaping over the fence that divided the path from the grass. Steve gave a low chuckle and Sam rolled his eyes once and ignored him, even when Bucky started cutting closer and closer.

A bellowed, "Hey!" startled all three of them, and they careened to a stop. A woman in a pair of grey overalls was waving a rake and scowling at Bucky.

"Yes?" he called.

She pointed the rake at him. "Stay off the grass! You'll rip it up with your damn hooves."

Sam barked out a laugh and Steve joined in, but they both shut up when the woman turned her glare on them.

"Sorry," Bucky called and carefully jumped over the fence and back onto the path.

"That's better."

He was too surprised to do more than stare at the woman, who'd turned her back on him and was fussing with one of the gardens. When he turned away, he met Steve's eyes. His eyebrows were raised slightly, reflecting Bucky's surprise, and he knew they were both reacting to the same thing: the non-reaction. Whatever this was, it was the next thing to perfect.

Sam was laughing quietly under his breath. "Stay off the grass. I'm gonna remember that one." He stretched, joints popping. "You about ready to head back?"

Steve said yes and made small talk with Sam on the way back while Bucky watched the city around them.

There were more people, more traffic, on the walk back. They collected more looks, but they weren't that different from the looks they got back home when someone recognised them. When they were out, and someone figured out who Steve was. When someone figured out who he was. When someone figured out who _they_ were. It was almost always worse when they were together, the pair of them feeding into the fairy tale mythos the world had built up around them.

And Bucky wasn't going to say the world was exactly wrong—as long as they weren't looking to Disney for their fairy tales. As long as they went way way back to when girls danced their feet off and huntsmen sliced out the hearts of queens, when happy endings took blood and pain and death to get to. Yeah, maybe he and Steve were a fairy tale.

He glanced down at himself, looked over at Steve—and had to fight the urge to laugh. They were two centaurs walking down the streets of New York City. That fairy tale business suddenly seemed a lot more relevant.

When they got back to the Tower, the last thing Sam said to them before disappearing up to his own floor was, "Don't forget tonight. And by forget I mean _forget_."

"We won't," Steve reassured him, and Sam nodded.

"Tonight?" Bucky asked quietly, once Sam was gone.

"That actually rings a bell. It'll be in the calendar."

It was in the calendar. Steve groaned and tossed his phone on the counter.

"We don't have to go."

"Didn't we have this conversation a couple of days ago?"

"Part of us did, anyway."

"What do you want to do?" Steve stepped closer, not touching him, but looking at him in that way that might as well be touching. Intense. Intent. The look that said, _Whatever you want Bucky_. _I'll make it happen. Just say the words._

"I want to close my eyes and open them to everything being normal again."

A ghost passed over Steve's face, a shadow made of regret and sorrow, and Bucky wanted to kick himself. "Afraid I can't do that Bucky. Normal's a long time gone."

"You know that's not what I meant." He pressed forward into Steve's space, crowding him, and missed his metal arm so much, because he wanted to wrap his metal fingers around the nape of Steve's neck and hold on. He used his left hand anyway, squeezing hard, and felt Steve relax under his touch. "What we have's our normal. It's what we have. It's what we want. It's us." He brought his other hand up and pressed it against Steve's sternum, fingers curling over Steve's clavicle.

Steve would bruise, briefly, from the press of Bucky's fingers, but they'd fade like the shadow was fading from Steve's face. "It's us," he said, quiet, but it wasn't a question.

"It's us," Bucky repeated and loosened his grip. Steve caught the hand on his chest and squeezed hard. "We'll go to this thing."

"You sure?"

"Yeah, I want to see just how thorough this mind fuckery is."

"No one thought this was a little on the nose?" Steve muttered to Bucky.

Bucky tilted his head in acknowledgement but didn't stop scanning their surroundings.

The Central Park Zoo was something worth looking at, especially done up like this, but given he and Bucky were currently _half horse_ , Steve couldn’t help feeling a little…insulted wasn't quite the right word, but it was damn close.

Of course, everyone thought that was normal, so they wouldn’t see anything wrong with having a 'meet the Avengers' fundraising gala at the zoo.

Still.

"Let it go, will you?" Bucky said in his ear.

"Fine."

On the nose or not, it was a damn sight better than any other event they'd been paraded around. Once they got back to themselves, Steve was going to suggest it as an alternative to…literally anywhere else. The night sky was illuminated by brilliant blue lights, filling the trees and lighting up the giant rocky pool which formed the centrepiece of the event. Sea lions glided through the water and hauled themselves up onto rocks to watch the proceedings, and Steve couldn't help thinking they looked amused by the whole thing.

It might just be the way their faces were made, but they seemed to give off that air.

Steve couldn't blame them. They got to relax and sprawl out on their rocks, taking the occasional dip when they felt like it. They didn't have to make awkward small talk with rich strangers who got way too close and had no idea how to take a hint or even that they were supposed to.

At least it wasn't just the two of them. It was the whole team, even Sam, who was technically not an Avenger (just ask him), but who was honestly attracting just as much attention as any of them. More, even, but Steve could tell he was basking in it.

What was interesting, Steve figured out as the night progressed, waitstaff circulating with cocktails and appetisers, was that he and Bucky _weren't_.

This wasn't Steve's first one of these, not even close, but it was the first where he hadn't been mobbed. In a genteel way, of course, but mobbed was mobbed, even when it was done in ten-thousand-dollar formal wear.

Of course, he'd never been to one of these as a centaur, but here, as far as they'd been able to work work out, Captain America had always been a centaur, so that shouldn't make a difference. None of these people knew he wasn't supposed to have four legs and a tail.

People were talking to him, shaking his hand and taking selfies, they wanted to meet him and be seen with him, but it was different.

Steve couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was. The eagerness was tempered with, not caution, but…something. Not that he was complaining. He was happy to have the distance. He didn't mind the breathing space, but it was an odd note and he didn't know where it came from.

They'd read the history. He was still Captain America. He'd been transformed by the serum. Here, whatever here was, it had made him into this, but he'd still fought in the War. Honestly, it was probably only because of the War, because of the unrelenting horror of it, that this him had been accepted; outside of wartime he'd have been locked in a lab or put down on the spot, he was sure.

But the War had primed people's mind to accept the unacceptable, to believe the unbelievable, to comprehend the incomprehensible, because that's what war was. How hard would one more impossible thing have been? God, the serum turning him into this might even have been _better_. What he'd actually been changed into had only been amazing; this, this complete transformation? That would have been a damn miracle. _If the government can do that, why they can do anything, including win the war._ He made a mental note to check the propaganda when they got back to the Tower.

He was still Captain America, as much as he'd ever been, so it wasn't that. This him had done everything the real him had done. He and Bucky were still the same fairy tale, and even as he thought that an older couple approached them, a familiar starry-eyed expression in their eyes.

But it wasn't _quite_ familiar. There was that same edge he couldn't identify. As Steve bent his head to listen to them he gave up trying to figure it out, but it didn't go away.

When they got back to their floor in the Tower, Bucky stripped out of his tux—a lot easier now that it didn't involve pants—tossed it over a chair with a satisfied sigh, then threw himself on the couch, rolling on his back and wriggling with his legs flailing in the air. It was ridiculous, and ridiculously cute, and Steve watched him, a half-smile on his face, until Bucky flopped onto his side.

"What?" he challenged, eyes narrowed.

"Nothing, Buck."

"That's what I thought."

Steve grabbed his tablet and leaned against the kitchen counter, pulling up not the history of Captain America, places and dates and facts, but the propaganda.

It wasn't that far off what he'd been thinking. They hadn't been able to cover up what he'd become, not when he'd galloped off after Erskine's killer in front of a city full of witnesses, and so they'd sold it. _Look what we can do. Look what we can make. We can create miracles._ In a country primed to accept anything that would help them win the war, people had eaten it up.

Bucky hooked his chin over Steve's shoulder. "What're you looking at?"

Steve tipped the tablet so Bucky could see.

"What brought this on?"

"Nothing seemed weird about the way people were reacting to me tonight?"

He felt Bucky tilt his head to look at him and when he turned his head, Bucky's gaze was steady. 

"Almost like they were…it wasn't afraid. It was…" Steve trailed off.

"No," Bucky said, "it wasn't afraid."

After a moment, Steve looked away and kept reading, Bucky leaning against his shoulder. The posters were there, the comics, the film serials, same as in their world, but they were different. Captain America was still perfect, moral and righteous, but he was less golden boy and more: _Look at the sacrifice he made. Can you do any less?_

"Not all that different," Steve said. "Still using Captain America to lure people in, just a different angle." He shut down the tablet, dumped it on the counter, and paced around the living room.

Bucky was wearing an expression Steve knew well. It meant Bucky was trying to decide whether or not to say something.

"You can say it, Buck."

"You might not want to hear it."

"When has that ever stopped you?"

"There was that one time—"

Steve raised both eyebrows, asking _Really?_

"True," Bucky conceded. "Right. What we are now? This?" He twisted to run his hand down his body, hand sliding over his withers, down his spine, over his rump, then turned to face Steve again. "It's not that much different than what we were before."

Steve lifted one front hoof and shook it pointedly, making the hair flutter, and gave Bucky a highly doubtful look. "No?"

"No." Bucky folded and unfolded his left hand, staring at the movement of tendons, the curl of fingers. "Sure, before we looked the same as everyone else." His mouth quirked. "Approximately. But we weren't. We could lift tanks, jump out of planes without a parachute, no matter how stupid that is." Bucky's eyes narrowed for a moment and Steve smiled innocently. "I survived falling into a ravine and having my arm ripped off. What I did to you on the helicarrier—" His eyes were dark, deep, serious. "No one human would have survived that. What HYDRA did to me? No one human would have survived that, either."

Static was gathering under his skin, a buzz of tension. "What are you sayin', Buck?"

"I'm saying all that's changed here is that now they can see it. No one can pretend you're anything but what you are. What the Army did to you, what HYDRA did to me. They made us not quite human."

"Buck." It was a whisper out of a dry throat and he reached out a hand, let it fall, afraid to touch him. He'd thought they were past this. He'd thought—

"Oh, for fuck's sake. Steve." Bucky grabbed his hand and hauled him closer, Steve's hooves sliding across the floor, and pivoted so they were pressed together, side to side, shoulder to shoulder, flank to flank, flicking his tail to fall like a waterfall across Steve's back. "Not like that. I didn't mean it like that, like we're some kind of inhuman monsters. I mean here, no one can pretend what the Army did to you didn't change you into something fundamentally _different._ "

Bucky wrapped his fingers around Steve's chin and gently pulled his head around so Steve had to meet his eyes.

"It's why things are different here, why history doesn't paint you as America's golden boy. Harder to sell you as the American dream, as the American ideal, as Mom and Dad and Apple Pie when you've got a great big pair of balls hanging under your tail."

Steve gave a startled laugh. "You saying I didn't have a great big pair of balls in the other place?"

"Oh, you did. Too damn big for all our good, and you know it." Bucky kissed him, hard and deep, and Steve felt it rush down his spine, send shivers through his whole body.

"Yeah, well I'm not the only one."

Bucky grinned, sharp and wicked, but it slowly faded, and he let his hand fall to rest on Steve's chest. "You get what I'm saying? I'm not saying we're monsters, I'm saying—"

"You're saying we're what we've been made into, and looking like this, people can't hide from it."

"Exactly." There was an unmistakable thread of satisfaction in Bucky's voice. "That's what was different tonight. No one was afraid of you, Steve. They were _aware._ For the first time, no one can hide from what was done to you." Steve slid a hand down Bucky's left arm, and Bucky said, "Back home, you're perfect, you're beautiful, you're golden. They can ignore everything it's cost you, every damn thing you've paid. Here, they look at you, and they have to remember because it's shoved right in front of their face."

Steve swallowed, Bucky's gaze holding him hard, and he didn't know what to say. Even if he'd had words, they wouldn’t have made it out past the hot lump in his throat.

"And that's good," he said, low and so fierce it startled Steve. "That's how it should be. If they had to remember what it cost you, if they had to _see_ it, they'd start treating you like Steve, and a little less like something they own."

"Bucky?"

He shook his head and slowly ran his hands up Steve's arms. "It's okay. I just get a little tired of people treatin' you like a blow-up doll they can take out of the box when they want a little gratification. Tonight…" A flash of teeth. "Tonight was the first one of those I've really enjoyed."

"Okay. Okay, we can talk about that when we get back, but Bucky?"

"Yeah, Steve?"

Steve kissed Bucky's neck, his jaw, rested his forehead against Bucky's temple. "Your analogies could use some work."

Bucky laughed and pulled Steve's head around to kiss him properly, deeply, and Steve lost himself in it, crowding closer, wrapping his arms around Bucky as tight as he could.

When they broke apart, Bucky laughed breathlessly. "Maybe, but I guarantee you won't forget it."


	6. Chapter 6

Sam begged off the next morning, claiming a hangover, so Bucky and Steve were on their own running through the park. They'd considered skipping it, but both their bodies were clamouring to run, the need simmering under their skin like banked fire.

They _didn't_ run on the grass. Bucky didn't fancy getting yelled at again.

They were tearing through the park, galloping along the path, when they came around a turn and had to slide to a halt, front hooves digging desperately into the path, because there was a kid standing there. She skipped off the path as they got close and stood there, arms folded, looking irritated.

It was way too early for a kid to be out on their own in the park, and she looked way too young to be out on her own at any time. Steve gave Bucky a panicked look and Bucky rolled his eyes. "Jeez, Steve," he said under his breath, "it's just a kid." But he'd seen Steve with kids, and hilarious as it usually was, this probably wasn't the time.

"Hey, sweetheart," Bucky called, staying right where he was, because compared to them she was tiny and also, they were _centaurs_ and who the hell knew what she was going to think of that. He braced himself for any reaction, up to and including screaming.

Which, he realised about five seconds later, was stupid. He might want to scream when he caught sight of himself in the mirror, but everyone else thought he was exactly what he was supposed to be.

And everyone knew exactly who he and Steve were.

She didn't scream. She clapped her hands together in what appeared to be satisfaction.

Next to him, Steve flinched.

"Are you lost?" Bucky asked.

"My dad's lost," she said. "He was supposed to stay with me, but he didn't, and I don't know how to find him again."

"That wasn't very smart of him."

"I know," she agreed, sounding extremely put out.

Bucky had to hide a grin. "Want some help finding him?"

"Yes, please," she said primly.

"Okay, well, this is Steve," he pointed at Steve, who gave an awkward wave. "And I'm Bucky."

"My name's Millie, but that's not right," she said, voice firm. "You're Captain America," she told Steve. "I have a book about you, and it says you're Captain America. And you're Bucky Barnes," she told Bucky. "That's why I can talk to you. My dad says never talk to strangers, but my book says you can always trust Captain America and Bucky Barnes."

Steve's face did something complicated Bucky couldn't quite decipher, but then he smiled, and it was one of the gentlest things Bucky had ever seen. "That's right, you can. And we'll help you find your dad." He paused. "Do you want to ride on my back?"

She eyed him critically. "You're very big."

"How about Bucky, then?"

She turned her gaze on Bucky, then nodded. "Okay."

"Is it okay if I lift you up on him?"

She raised her arms and Steve scooped her up and settled her on Bucky's back. She weighed almost nothing. Bucky started walking carefully, Steve at his shoulder so he could make sure she didn't fall.

"Where should we start?" Bucky asked.

"He was over by the pool, so probably there."

"The pool it is."

They'd been walking for a few minutes, when Millie piped up, asking, "Are you called Bucky because horses buck?"

Steve choked on a laugh. Bucky shot him a glare, but quick as he was, Steve's face had smoothed into pure innocence. It matched his voice when he said, "That's exactly why."

Everything Bucky wanted to say in response wasn't child friendly, so he settled for another glare.

Steve gave him a shit-eating grin. "Something wrong?"

"Nothing that won't wait 'til later."

Steve laughed, his whole body shaking with it, and Bucky smacked him with his tail.

Even walking, Bucky taking smooth careful strides so he didn't accidentally knock Millie off, they covered a lot of ground in a short time. It wasn't long before they picked up the sound of a frantic voice calling, "Millie!"

"Here!" Steve called, and they sped up a little, heading towards the voice.

"That your dad?" Bucky asked, and Millie nodded. "He sounds worried."

"He gets lost a lot."

"Sounds pretty careless. Maybe you should keep a closer eye on him?"

"Probably." She sighed.

"Millie, thank god." A man in a scruffy brown sweater and blue jeans, a bright pink backpack hanging off one shoulder, his short black hair messy, like he'd been running his hands through it, ran straight up to Bucky, his arms outstretched. Millie slid off Bucky's back and into them, and he clutched her tight. "How many times have I told you, you can't run off like that."

"You're supposed to keep up."

"I can't keep up if you run off without telling me." Her dad kissed the top of her head and set her on the ground, taking her hand and hanging on tight. "I turned around and you were gone." He looked up at Steve, at Bucky. "Thank you. Thank you for finding her. We haven't been to this park before, and when she disappeared—" He stopped and shook his head.

"It was no problem," Steve said. "She said you get lost a lot?"

The look he gave his daughter was equal parts exasperated and adoring. "I take my eyes off her for one second and she disappears. I don't know how she does it."

Millie had walked to the length of her dad's arm, stretching it out, and was pulling at her dad's hand, but she stopped and turned back to say, "I'm quick as a snake. That's what Mrs Aspestrand says."

"Mrs Aspestrand is right," her dad said.

Bucky wasn't sure what was going through Steve's head, but he had that look on his face that said he had a plan. "Millie?" he said, and there was the barest brush of command voice, enough to get her attention. She looked at him with curious attentiveness. "Your book said you could trust Captain America, right?"

She nodded.

"Then trust me when I tell you it's scary when you lose someone you love, when you don't know where they are."

"Did that happen to you?"

Steve pointed at Bucky and nodded. 

Millie frowned. "But you got him back."

"It was still scary when he was gone. So when you lose your dad, you're really scaring him."

 "Am I?" she asked her dad.

"Yeah, honey, you really are."

She frowned again. "Okay."

"That's probably the best you'll get, but thanks for trying." He smiled ruefully. "At this point, I'm guessing she's going to grow up to be an astronaut. Space is going to be the only place big enough for her to explore."

Bucky and Steve both smiled, because Millie was tugging at her dad's hand again, clearly having had enough of standing around.

"Sorry, manners." He offered his hand. "Kevin Rose."

They shook his hand in turn and introduced themselves.

"Thank you again for bringing Millie back."

"Thanks for finding my dad," Millie said, pulling at her dad determinedly. "Dad, come on, I want to go see the birds."

"And we'd better go," Kevin said, letting Millie drag him away.

"Good deed for the day?" Bucky asked.

"I guess so…Buck."

"Oh, you asshole."

Steve bolted, laughing, and Bucky bolted after him, their hoofbeats thundering through the park.

The scream of the Avengers alert was the same.

Calling it a scream was overselling it, maybe—it wasn't all that loud, but it was piercing, demanding, and it had never called them to anything good.

Bucky was out of bed, rolling to stand on all four hooves, Steve not far behind him. Bucky tossed him his phone, listened as he said, "How long?" and "Where?" and " _What?_ You're kidding. Animal control can't deal with it?" Steve pinched the bridge of his nose and his tail lashed the air. Then he sighed. "Right. Of course. Not at that size."

"Don't ask," he said to Bucky after he hung up, tossing the phone onto the bed and heading for the closet where they kept their gear.

Bucky followed. "I almost don't want to," he said, starting to pull on his uniform.

Steve shook his head and laughed. "Two words: giant weasels." 

Bucky paused and stared at nothing. Then he shrugged. "Giant weasels. Sure, why not."

Their gear was _almost_ the same, but the bits that fit his horse parts were intuitive, and he'd taken them off Steve, so it didn't take much figuring out to get them on, his body flexible enough he could manage it on his own.

Except for one thing. He held it up. Steve glanced over, then did a double take. "Think we need it?"

"I am _not_ getting clawed in the balls. And neither are you. I have a vested interest." 

Steve laughed again and held out his hand. "Give it here." Bucky handed it over and Steve moved around behind him. "Spread 'em, will you? And get your tail out of the way."

"Sweet talker," Bucky said as he did so.

Steve's hands were cold and Bucky hissed as Steve settled his balls in the cup. It was the least arousing thing Bucky had ever experienced. "For the record? I used to like you touching my balls, but this is not sexy."

"Tell me about it." Steve settled the straps in place and fastened the Velcro. "Comfy?"

"Close as it's gonna get. Let me do you."

It got him a wry smile, a pointed look, and Bucky snorted and motioned for Steve to turn around. It didn't take long to loop the strap through his back legs, to settle his balls into the cup, to run the straps up on either side of his tail and up his flanks and fasten them.

"You think it's so we don't get hurt, or so they don't flop around?" Bucky asked, stepping back to eye his handiwork

"I'm guessing a little of both." Steve made a face. "And you weren't kidding. That is not sexy."

"Told you. Ready?"

Steve slipped the shield onto his back and nodded. "Ready."

The quinjet was waiting on the roof, and they were the last ones there. No one seemed surprised, but maybe that was because it took longer to gear up when you had this much body to cover.

"So, giant weasels. That's a first, right?" Sam asked.

"First for me," Steve replied. "Buck?"

"Same." He glanced at Natasha, who smiled enigmatically.

Clint laughed and said, "Unless politicians count, it's a first for me, too."

"And rounding it out with a first for me," Tony said over the comms. "But I feel like there's been a real opportunity missed here. Someone has giant weasels and they don't let them loose on City Hall? The bad guys are slipping."

The block had been cordoned off and cleared, which was a good thing because the six, eight, twelve?—Steve was having trouble keeping count because they were bouncing around so fast—weasels were having a field day with the buildings, awnings, mail boxes, street signs, and one was currently gnawing on a fire hydrant, which really couldn’t be good for its teeth.

"Are we sure this isn't an animal control problem?" he said as they approached the nearest barrier. "I don't think they really count as _giant_."

One of them bounced on top of a parked car, crushing it.

"Okay, maybe not."

They watched them for a bit, Sam flying overhead to get their attention and they popped up onto their back legs, then ran after him in a strange, accordion gallop, following him in circles like he was some kind of fascinating,m high-tech butterfly. They were sort of cute, with long, fuzzy brown bodies, pale faces with a black mask over their eyes, bright pink noses and long tails that wiggled in the air as they chased after Sam.

"They're literally just animals," Clint said. "I'm not shooting weasels just because they're bigger than normal and they trashed a few cars."

"They're not weasels."

As one, everyone turned towards Natasha.

"They're ferrets," she said, watching them with…was that fondness? "Not much more than babies."

"They grow 'em big in New York," Sam said, swooping down to brush the head of one stretching up on its hind legs. "Ferrets are supposed to be cat-sized and these are about as big as Cap."

"You're telling me we have a bunch of giant baby _ferrets_ tearing up the street." Steve pinched the bridge of his nose. "Clint's right, we're not hurting baby animals. Any ideas?"

"Wear them out. Eventually they'll fall asleep," Natasha said. "Then figure out where to take them. Tony, you must have property somewhere that would work."

"Oh goody," Tony said. "I always wanted pets."

Steve watched as yet another car was crushed under the weight of a ferret, metal crunching and glass shattering. "We can't leave them here. They're gonna get hurt."

"So what do you want to do with them?" Sam asked.

Steve did some mental calculations. "It's not that far to Central Park. If we can get their attention, we can lead them there. Less chance they'll get hurt, and the zoo's there if they do. Someone there's bound to know how to help."

"You big softy," Bucky muttered.

"It's not their fault they got dumped here."

"You heard me," Bucky said, grinning and bumping his hindquarters against Steve's.

Suddenly the ferrets went still, heads high, practically vibrating as they stared fixedly in the same direction.

"Uh oh," Clint said.

"Uh oh?" Bucky repeated.

"Uh oh," Sam confirmed.

"Can everyone stop saying _uh oh_ and tell me what's going on?" Steve asked.

"We forgot one of the fundamentals of dealing with baby animals," Clint said.

"What's that?"

"Sooner or later mama's gonna show up."

A giant ferret slowly rose from behind a building, a furry snake-shaped eldritch awakening, and surveyed the scene before her. She was truly a giant, several stories high, looking down on them all.

"Still not shooting her," Clint piped up.

"No one's hurting any of them," Steve said, watching her. He wouldn't claim to be any expert on ferret body language, but she didn't seem upset.

She coiled around the building, bricks tumbling free as she smashed through the corner, and nosed the smaller ferrets who ran over to bounce around her. She lowered her head to eye Steve and Bucky, then lifted it to consider Sam.

"Get them to follow us and get them out of here?" Bucky asked.

"That's still the plan."

"Here ferret ferret ferret?" Bucky suggested, with more than a hint of sarcasm.

Mama ferret's ears pricked forward and she swung her head towards him.

"I can't believe that worked."

"Sam, Tony, give us a path."

With a combination of Bucky's crooning and cajoling and Steve and Bucky riling up the babies, they soon had one giant mama ferret and her litter of slightly less giant ferrets galloping after them through the streets of New York, Sam and Tony giving them a route that would cause the least destruction.

They hit Central Park and turned onto East Drive, heading past The Met, when suddenly everything came to a crashing halt.

Literally.

Mama skidded to a stop, nose up, sniffing madly, the babies tumbling nose over tail as they tried to emulate her rapid stop, and plunged off in a different direction. The baby ferrets followed, and Steve and Bucky slid to a halt, spun, and galloped after them.

They slowed when a voice rang out, "No! No, what are you doing here! You're supposed to be a distraction!"

They found the pack of ferrets bouncing around a group of humans who were definitely up to no good. Steve knew it was wrong to judge by appearances, but only certain conclusions could be drawn from people dressed all in black, who were loaded up with complex looking equipment, stuff that wouldn't look out of place in Tony's lab, that had this level of furtive look about them.

Plus people who _weren't_ up to no good generally didn't need distractions.

Bucky tapped Steve's elbow and pointed: there were gleaming metal patches stuck to the side of The Met at regular intervals.

Sam swept by overhead, Tony close behind, Natasha and Clint pulled up on a motorcycle that Steve was certain was _borrowed_ , and, as if all energy had suddenly deserted them and they wished to be very clear they were done playing now, thanks, the baby ferrets surged forward and collapsed on the certainly-up-to-no-good people, pinning them to the ground. Mama ferret curled into an extremely large-but-tidy ball next to them.

"Who are these guys?" Sam asked as Tony started studying the equipment.

"No idea," Steve replied. "But I'm gonna go out on a limb and say they own the ferrets. Right?"

The only response from the tangled pile of people and ferrets was a series of groans.

"Which means you let these guys loose in the city." Steve glared at them, tail lashing the air, dug one hoof into the turf, and opened the throttle on his _Captain America is disappointed in you_ voice. "They could have been hurt. They could have been _killed_. You were responsible for them, and you just let them loose. What have you got to say for yourselves?"

A muffled, "Sorry?" came from the pile.

"Damn right. And you _will_ put them back the way they were before."

An extremely meek, "Yes," escaped from the pile, followed by, "We can do it now if—"

A different voice cut in, barking, "Shut up!"

The first voice hissed, "It's _Captain America_. You shut up. This was your stupid idea anyway." There was the sound of a clearing throat. "If you get us out from under here we can shrink them back to normal."

"Good." He stepped back to find Bucky and everyone else staring at him. "What?"

"Nothin'" Sam said, clearly hiding a grin.

"Softy," Bucky whispered in his ear.

Tony, who'd been poking at the equipment, turned to stare at the ferrets, then he scanned the metal patches on the wall of The Met. Then he stared at the people just visible under the pile of sleeping ferrets. "Were you going to try and _shrink The Met_?"

Some noncommittal grumbling was his only answer.

"I think they were," Natasha said.

"I don't know if that's brilliant or moronic," Tony said, staring up into the night sky. "I'm leaning towards moronic myself. Wow."

There was more grumbling, followed by, "Could you just call the cops now?"

They'd called the cops, as requested, who'd been entirely unfazed by giant ferrets and attempted theft of the entire Metropolitan Museum of Art. But that was New York for you. Once returned to normal size, the ferrets had technically been evidence, but the officer who'd taken custody of them had been crooning to them like they were long-lost family rediscovered, so Steve wasn't worried.

He was actually feeling pretty damn good at a callout ending so well. The property damage had been minimal. No one had died. No one had been hurt.

He knew he wasn't the only one feeling that way, the thread of satisfaction tying them together. It was why they'd grabbed food together, casual and comfortable, instead of going their separate ways like they usually did.

"Is it just me or was that the stupidest plan ever?" Tony asked.

"Which part?" Bucky asked. "Making giant animals to use as a distraction, using a distraction that ended up getting them caught, or trying to steal The Met by shrinking it?"

"Let's go for D, all of the above."

"I mean, the distraction wasn't terrible as far as distractions go," Sam said. "They had no way of knowing we'd end up at The Met."

"I think they should have known there was a chance that could happen," Clint said around a mouthful of burger. "Central Park's not that far away from where they dumped the ferrets."

There was a collective pause as they considered this, then Tony said, "Okay, point, but if they hadn't distracted us we wouldn’t have known there was anything to be distracted from in the first place."

"We still didn't know there was anything to be distracted from. It was dumb luck we ended up there," Sam pointed out, then paused. "Dumb luck and ferrets having really good noses."

"Okay, also point, but I'm still sticking with stupidest plan ever."

"I'm not going to argue with you," Sam said.

"Uh, you just were. There were distinct overtones of disagreement."

"But not about it being the stupidest plan ever," Bucky pointed out. "Only about the distraction."

"Now I'm being ganged up on. I need Bruce to come back. Natasha, you want to jump in here?"

"Stealing the contents of The Met by shrinking the whole building isn't a _terrible_ plan. As long as you can unshrink it without doing any damage. You'd get everything, you'd automatically disable the alarms because they'd be cut off from the mains, and any that worked on their own power would be so small you wouldn't be able to hear them over the background noise of the city. All you'd have to do was pick it up and run."

"Very helpful, thank you." She smiled at him, small and satisfied, and Tony grumbled. "I'm sorry I asked."

Steve shifted, cocking a back leg as he relaxed to stand hip-shot. Next to him, Bucky shifted to lean into his side, their tails idly swishing. As Tony launched into an explanation of how the structural integrity wouldn't hold if you shrunk the building, not to mention the damage that would be done when the connection to water and sewerage was severed— _the whole tiny building would get washed away by the water mains before you could rescue it_ —trying to drag Clint into it to back him up, it struck him how comfortable it felt.

How familiar.

Sam met his eyes briefly, a shared _can you believe these guys?_ look, and Steve felt something tight uncoil from around his heart.

This was his team. However strange, impossible, beyond understanding this situation was, it was real. It was happening. This wasn't some constructed reality, populated by false shadows of the people he knew. These were _his_ people, as real as Bucky.

He didn't know what it meant, and he didn't know what they should do, but he did know—this was really happening. 


	7. Chapter 7

The next day, a package arrived. Once it had been scanned to within an inch of its life, it made its way to their floor. Inside were a pair of crocheted dolls, centaurs, clearly meant to be Steve and Bucky. Steve even had a crocheted shield.

Steve passed them to Bucky and pulled out the note.

_I made these for Millie a few months ago, but she asked me to send them to you. She says the Captain America is for Bucky and the Bucky is for Captain America, in case you ever get lost, so you'll still have each other with you._

_-Kevin Rose_

Steve couldn’t help smiling and he reached to pluck the Bucky doll out of Bucky's hands. It was perfect. It was adorable, the hair wild, just what Bucky looked like when he woke up in the morning. The chestnut coat was a perfect match and his little black hooves were…

Were.

That wasn't right.

He drew in a sharp breath.

Bucky's head came up. "Steve?"

He blinked down at the doll and carefully closed his hand around it. Last night he'd decided this had to be real and this morning… "I forgot."

"You forgot," Bucky said cautiously.

"Yeah, I forgot. Just for a second, I forgot that we aren't, that we weren't…this." He held up the doll. "How could I do that?" He shook his head. "That hasn't happened to you. Has it?"

"No." Bucky rubbed his hand over his mouth and put the Steve doll back in the box. "But I might have an idea about that." He walked over to the couch, and his tail was twitching slightly, back and forth. "Come sit down."

He set the doll on the table and made his way to the couch, heaving himself up on it and laying down with all four legs neatly tucked beneath him, leaving room for Bucky, in case Bucky wanted to join him.

Bucky didn't. Bucky leaned his front legs against the couch and cocked a back hip. "You've been through this before. So have I. Not here, not this whatever this is. But before before, where we come from. But when it happened to you, it was your choice. It was, I guess, a good thing. You became this huge, strong, healthy man."

Bucky's words caught him, drove everything else out of his head. "You don't think it was a good thing?"

Bucky heaved a huge sigh and his tail lashed. "I think it happened. If it hadn't happened we wouldn't be together now. It, Steve, it's given you, it's given _us,_ so much good. But it changed you, and I know you, so I know damn well you never thought about what it was going to mean for _you_. You only thought about what it was going to mean for everyone else." He smiled. "I bet, even here, if someone had taken you aside and said: 'by the way, it's gonna to turn you into a centaur', you still would have asked 'em where to sign."

"Probably," Steve admitted, with a short huff of laughter.

" _Probably_ ," Bucky said under his breath. "You've gotta understand, Steve. The mind can adapt to anything. To _anything_. I know what I'm talking about here. Your mind's looking for a template, something it can fit this experience into, and it's got one. It's got a perfect one. One you chose, one that's good, mostly, so it makes sense your mind's going to adapt. That's not gonna happen to me."

Steve understood. He understood, and his heart ached, because if Steve had chosen his change, had thrown himself into it like the world had been burning behind him, _choice_ was the one thing Bucky'd had stolen from him at every turn. "Buck," he started, then stopped, because what words could ever do justice to what Bucky had survived?

Bucky seemed to hear them anyway. "I know," he said quietly. "But it means my mind knows it's a trap. It knows nothing good comes out of getting changed like this." He stopped and cracked a brief, wry, smile as he pressed the fingers of his left hand against Steve's cheek, a press of warm flesh when Steve kept expecting them to be cool metal. "At least not for a hell of a long time. So it won't adapt. It'll keep reminding me that this isn't what we are."

"Yeah." He reached for Bucky and Bucky knelt on the couch so Steve could wrap him in his arms. "Everything we've seen—this is real. It's really happening. This isn't some kind of…I don't even know. Mindfuckery, virtual reality, dreamscape, whatever. It's real. And we're not going to figure it out on our own."

Deciding to explain what was happening had been complicated. They hadn't expected the actual explanation to be equally as complicated. Actually, that wasn't completely accurate—it only took three words to explain; it was after those three words things started to go off the rails.

They asked Sam to come to their apartment, they got him to sit down, and then Steve said, simple and to the point, "We're not centaurs."

Sam blinked, taken aback. "I know."

There was a long pause.

"You know," Bucky said, cautious, testing the waters, while Sam gave him a puzzled look, like he was waiting for the punchline.

Steve started to wonder if he'd been wrong. Maybe this _wasn't_ real. Maybe it was a dreamscape, a virtual reality, and this wasn't Sam at all.

"Yeah, we've been through this before," Sam said. "You're not centaurs. Centaurs don't exist. They're mythological creatures. Neither of you like it when people call you that, and you've both made it clear dozens of times. Doesn't stop people from doing it, because some people are assholes, but most people are pretty good about it." He looked back and forth between them. "Has someone been calling you that?"

Steve hung his head and fought the urge to laugh. He tilted his head and caught Bucky's eye, saw he was fighting the same urge. "Not what we meant, Sam, but thanks."

"Okay, what did you mean?"

"We're not this. We're not any kind of part-horse creatures. The serum didn't do this to us." Steve could see the question _so what did?_ shaping itself in Sam's eyes, and quickly added, " _Nothing_ did. This isn't us. We've got two legs, two human legs, same as you. The only thing the serums we got did was…amp us up. Strength, healing, speed. It didn't change us into this."

Sam looked pointedly at Steve's rear-end, and then at Bucky's, looked down at their hooves, and then back up at Steve's face.

"I know. I know what it looks like, but up until we fought that elf we didn't look like this. We weren't this. He did something, he changed something."

"I had a metal arm," Bucky added.

"You had a metal arm," Sam said dubiously.

"Oh, being a centaur isn't weird, but you can't believe I had a metal arm," Bucky snarked, stamping a hoof.

"Sorry, man, but it's a bit out there."

Bucky crossed his arms and lashed his tail.

Sam pursed his lips and looked up at the ceiling. "Okay, just let me make sure I have this straight. You're saying that when we fought the elf guy, he did something so that you guys got changed into this, and Bucky here lost his _metal arm_ , and you two are the only ones who know about it. The rest of the world just accepts it as normal."

"Yeah." It was close enough.

Sam leaned forward. "Are you sure someone didn't do something to you? To both of you? To your minds, I mean. Cause Steve, you're a great cheater, you're a fantastic bluffer, I'll die a happy man if I never play poker with you again, but I gotta tell you, when it comes to outright lies, you're lousy. That means you believe what you're saying but what you're saying is that the entire world got changed around you."

Sam's gentle, heartfelt words ripped through Steve, slicing right through the middle of his certainty and shaking its foundations. He went still, just about stopped breathing.

Was it possible? _Was_ that what had happened?

It didn't make more _sense_ , because there was no part of his life, of their lives, that made _sense_. But in a world where an old enemy could transfer his mind into a _computer_ and secretly control the strings of the world, where Steve could lie frozen under the ice for decades and come out unscathed, wasn't it more likely that he and Bucky really were this? Wasn't it more likely that this was what they'd been made into, and whatever the elf had done had made them _believe_ that they'd been something else, than that the whole world had changed around them?

He met Sam's eyes, searched his earnest, concerned face. Opened his mouth, lips already shaping the word _maybe_ , when a hand slammed down on his shoulder.

"No." It crashed down on him, an avalanche of a word, implacable, inescapable. "No." Fingers clenched around his shoulder, squeezing tight, hard enough to bruise. A familiar grip he knew in his heart it should be metal. He didn't wince. He looked up. Bucky's eyes were blazing, his left hand clamped on Steve's shoulder.

"Bucky…"

"No." Bucky's gaze shifted past him, fixed on Sam. "I have a metal arm. This one." He touched his left arm with his right hand. "It's shoved inside of me, it's welded to my bones. HYDRA sawed off what was left of my old one and they weren't gentle. I didn't ask for it. I didn't ask for any of it, but I have it. It's part of me. It's mine." Steve felt the tremor that went through him. "And it hurts. Every damn day it hurts. Using it breaks things inside of me. They heal, but it doesn't stop 'em from hurting. The more I use it, the more it hurts. That's real. That's _mine_. No one planted that in my mind. It's fucking real, and I know it's real because even with it gone I can still feel the ghost of it. I've still got the memory of the pain." 

Steve tore his gaze away from Bucky long enough to glance at Sam. He was calm, expression even, watching Bucky neutrally. He turned back to Bucky. Bucky was staring at his hand wrapped around Steve's shoulder. Steve caught his eyes and Bucky managed a small smile.

"I know you want me to stop hidin' it from everyone."

A cresting wave of love swamped him. He almost couldn't breathe. "I'm so fucking proud of you," he managed to get out, doubts washed away. He could almost feel the plates of Bucky's metal fingers, the ghost of it pressing into his skin, phantom touch, familiar and comforting. 

"And you trust me?"

"Always."

"This isn't us."

"I know."

The sound of Sam taking a deep breath drew their attention back to him. "Let's say I'm open to the possibility that what you're saying is right."

Relief exploded through Steve. Bucky tipped his head back and let out a long, slow breath.

"But even if I believe you, I can't do anything about it. I'm guessing this is high level magic shit, and as I've said before, I do what you do, only slower." Sam stopped. "Did I say that? Do you remember me saying that? Shit, how did we meet?"

"I lapped you when you were running. A bunch of times." Steve grinned, giddy with relief. "On your left?"

Sam glared at him. "Okay, I guess it's good to know some things don't change."

"Steve's a shit in any body," Bucky said. "You should have seen him when he was knee-high to a damn grasshopper. He was a little shit then, he got turned into a big shit, and I guess he's currently an extra-large shit."

"I resent that."

"Resent it all you like, it's true."

Steve thought about it, then lifted his hands in a _fair enough_ gesture, and Bucky nodded in satisfaction.

"How weird was it, waking up like this?" Sam asked.

"Sam, you have no idea," Steve replied.

"Kind of glad about that, actually." They lapsed into thoughtful silence. "What now?"

Steve shifted. "I think we bring Nat in."

"Just Nat?" Sam asked.

"For the moment. We want to keep it to as few people as possible. If we can fix it, it won't matter and if we can't—"

"Don't think that way," Bucky said.

"I know, Buck, but if we can't, I'm not sure we want people to know."

"Fair enough," Sam said. "I'm guessing I get to go round her up."

Natasha followed Sam into their apartment and stayed by the door, leaning against the wall, arms folded.

Steve exchanged a look with Bucky, then glanced at Sam. They looked at each other, then shook their heads.

"Looks like you're nominated," Natasha said. She looked as calm and inscrutable as ever, but he knew her, she allowed him to know her, and there was a thread of tension beneath it. Suddenly, he wondered how much she'd already figured out.

He took a minute to brace himself, then launched into the same explanation he'd given Sam. When he was done she said nothing, just studied him, then shifted her gaze to Bucky. Finally, just as the silence was stretching into uncomfortable, she said, "That explains it."

"Explains what?"

"Why you two have been acting strange." She pushed off the wall and flowed up to sit on the table. "I mean, I wasn't anticipating magicked into thinking you weren't supposed to look like this," she waved a hand at them, "but I knew something wasn't right."

"We don't think we're not supposed to look like this," Bucky said. "We're not supposed to look like this. This isn't us."

"For what it's worth," Sam added, "I believe them."

"It's worth a lot, actually, but you still can't be sure you weren't made to believe it."

Steve stared at her, then gave in to the urge and sighed in exasperation. "Come on, Nat. We're centaurs. Think about it for five seconds. It's ridiculous. How could the serum turn me, turn us, into _centaurs_?" 

"Honestly, the way you keep calling yourself a centaur is almost convincing me." She shifted her gaze to Sam. "You told them they don't like that?"

"First thing I said."

"The problem with the 'too ridiculous to be true' approach," she said, turning back to Steve, "is that both of you obviously are. And it's not that much more ridiculous than turning into an overpowered, oversized, overhealing superhuman. Or look at Banner—he turns into the Hulk. He was trying to recreate the serum, only without the shape-changing side effects, and we can see how well that worked."

"At least he's human shaped."

"Barely, which is not a slight on Banner." She held up her hand. "Either way, there might be someone who can help."

Hope fluttered to life and Steve saw it echoed on Bucky's face.

"It might take time," she warned. "From what I know, he's unpredictable. And kind of a jackass. But I'll send out the word."

"Big question," Sam said. "Do we tell anyone else?"

"Nat, what do you think?" Steve asked.

"I think no. At least for the moment. If this doesn't pan out, we'll have to re-evaluate."

"Bucky?"

"I'm with you."

"Okay, so for now we keep it between us."


	8. Chapter 8

The man Natasha's contacts sent them was tall and odd-looking, wearing a cloak that had more in common with Steve's tail than an article of clothing: it moved on its own, seemingly of its own will, and Steve eyed it suspiciously.

Steve wasn't sure how he'd arrived, since he'd knocked on the front door of their apartment without being announced by JARVIS, which meant he hadn't come through the building to get there. When they let him in, not without a lot of questions, he introduced himself as Doctor Strange.

And stared at them, eyes out of focus, like he was looking _through_ them.

"How strange." A brief smile. "I can see you as this, as what you are, and it's right, it's normal, but it's…precarious. And I can see you as something else entirely." He closed his eyes and cocked his head. "Big, blond, peak of physical perfection, perfect specimen of humanity. Both of you, more or less. And you," he pointed at Bucky, "you have a metal arm. No part of either of you consists of a horse." He opened his eyes. "Why do you have a metal arm?"

"Misplaced the original," Bucky said dryly.

"Hmm. There's got to be better prostheses."

"Not really the point right now."

"No. The point is, someone's been messing with the universe. With the universes, technically. Tell me what happened."

"We were fighting an elf." It got him one raised eyebrow and the cloak swirled, like it too would have raised its eyebrows, if only it had been fortunate to possess some. "Not an elf, a being of some kind, I don't know what he was. He said he was here to collect this planet's reality because it tasted like the Tesseract. When we objected he said we couldn't stop him because he could access universes as yet unborn, raised a forcefield around himself, and started summoning enemies out of thin air."

"Messed up scorpions with faces instead of stingers, demons, creatures made of fire, killer stuffed animals," Bucky counted them off on his fingers, "tentacles. A tower, but that was up when we got there."

"Iron Man deactivated his forcefield," Steve continued, "I hit him with the shield, Bucky shot him in the leg, he ran into the tower, which was when then tentacles appeared and grabbed us. We got free and went after him, followed him up to the top. He was in pretty bad shape."

"And he seemed pretty surprised by it," Bucky added.

Steve nodded. "He said it should have been easy. I told him he should always have a back up plan, he said they always do, Bucky shot him again, but it was too late. Everything went white and we woke up like this."

Doctor Strange steepled his fingers and stared into thin air. "Interesting."

 _Interesting._ Steve ground his teeth together. "I'm glad you find it interesting. Can you do something about it?"

"Of course."

"Now?"

"Not...immediately. I'll return when I'm ready." Sparks danced from his fingertips making Steve shift to a fighting stance and Bucky pull a knife, but the sparks twirled and swirled and formed a circle of fire in their living room that opened into what looked like a library. Without another word, he stepped through and then he, and the circle, vanished.

"And people say I'm dramatic," Steve muttered, staring at the spot where he'd disappeared.

"Think he's really a doctor?"

"Yeah, just like his name's really _Strange._ "

"Someone's been messing with the universes," Bucky said.

"It explains everything." They exchanged looks. "Don't think about it?"

"Gets my vote."

Who was he kidding; of course he was going to think about it. Steve thought about it while he watched Bucky stretch, while he watched Bucky walk around their apartment, while he watched Bucky fight with the coffee maker, which seemed determined to make him suffer.

_Can you do something about it?_

_Of course._

There'd been confidence pushing over into arrogance in that answer, the voice of a man with no doubt he could do what he'd said.

Bucky had abandoned his shirt after the self-styled doctor had vanished through his fire-circle, and Steve watched the muscles of his torso shift, let his gaze slide down over the chestnut fuzz to the muscles of the, of _his_ , horse chest, swept his eyes back to follow the line of his horse body. It was graceful, elegant, his tail slightly arched, each hoof delicate and strong.

He was beautiful. For the first time since they'd landed here, he felt interest stir, faint heat in his gut, static in his spine, in his fingertips. It was Bucky in that body, regardless of its shape, Bucky in every shift of muscle, Bucky in all the little movements, and someday soon that'd be enough.

Even if it was weirding him out. Even if working out the logistics would take some planning—but they didn't call him one of history's greatest tacticians for nothing.

A sudden thought stood up and waved to get his attention. It made him freeze as he stared at it, studied it, pulled it apart while it asked: _what if?_  

His sudden stillness was enough to draw Bucky's attention.

"You okay there, Steve?"

"Fine, Buck. Just thinking."

"Well, make sure you don't strain anything." He stretched his arms up over his head, bowing backwards, his front legs stretched out in front of him, letting out a long, low groan of satisfaction.

"I'll let you know if I smell anything burning." It was auto-pilot call and response, actual thought stolen away by Bucky, by his beauty, by the supple way he moved, by the spark of heat that had just shot straight up Steve's spine, and by the absolute insanity of the idea that had lodged itself in his brain.

"So it's not just in your heads," Natasha said, one elbow on the table as she studied Steve.

She and Sam had come for dinner to collect the report on Doctor Strange—even if Steve was sure it wasn't his real name. Now, they were perched on the tools across from Steve and Bucky, relaxing with coffee.

"Nat, if he's right our heads are the only place it isn't."

"Messing with the universes," Sam said, turning his coffee cup around. "Big stuff."

"Tell me about it," Bucky said. "Do you believe me about the arm now?"

Sam made a show of thinking about it, finally saying, "I guess so," at Bucky's exasperated look. "It'd be a pretty strange thing to lie about. Having trouble picturing it, though." He squinted at Bucky. "Is it shiny?"

Bucky rolled his eyes. "Shiny enough."

A sudden out-of-place sound put them all on instant alert. As one they turned to face the living room where a circle of fire spun into existence. Doctor Strange stepped through. He looked around the room, glancing from person to person, before focussing on Steve and Bucky. "All right, I've been to the moment, I know what happened. If you two would come with me."

"I take it this is the guy?" Sam said.

"This is the guy," Bucky replied.

"My contacts weren't kidding," Natasha said under her breath.

Steve nodded in agreement. "Just like that?"

"Did you have somewhere else to be?"

"I guess not," Steve replied.

"What's going to happen," Natasha asked, fixing Doctor Strange with a gimlet stare.

"I think it's best if people who belong here don't know too many details. Sorry." He didn't sound overly apologetic, but his cape shrugged elaborately. "Saying goodbye wouldn't be inappropriate," he added.

Steve had a sudden visceral memory of standing in the burger joint, knowing that, whatever else was going on, these were his people. Sam, Natasha, they were _Sam and Natasha._ They were the people he'd known he could call on when the whole world turned upside down.

Sam had believed him, believed them, when everything must have been telling him Steve was out of his mind. Natasha had found them someone to fix whatever this was...someone who was saying _goodbye wouldn't be inappropriate._

Maybe they weren't his Sam and Nat, but they were still Sam and Nat, and he had to say goodbye

It was Sam who saved him. "Come here." He gestured at Steve.

Steve walked over and Sam pulled him into a hard hug, and Steve held on tight. "Sam. Thank you."

"Any time, you know that," Sam said as he let go and stepped back. "You know, I can't imagine you with two legs."

"It's something to see," Bucky said, eyeing Sam, who eyed him back. "Are you going to hug me?"

"Not a chance."

"Manly handshake?"

"I can get behind that."

They shook hands, except Sam said, "What the hell, I might never get another chance," and gave Bucky a quick hug. Bucky, looking bemused, hugged him back.

Steve knew from the way Nat was watching him that her thoughts had been at least a little similar to his. She came to stand in front of him and went up on her toes to kiss his cheek. "Good luck, Steve."

"Thanks, Nat. I mean it."

She smiled and went to Bucky, brushing her hand down his left arm. "Metal, huh?" When Bucky grinned, she squeezed his hand before going to join Sam.

"Ready?" Doctor Strange asked, spinning up a fire-circle big enough for Steve and Bucky to fit through.

With one last look at the apartment, at Sam and Natasha, who were watching them, they stepped through, walking out into a room with dark wooden floors and deep green walls. It had a fireplace with an elaborate mantle, a pair of leather chairs, books and complicated knick-knacks, some simple and some entirely arcane, piled on every surface.

"Make yourselves comfortable. I'm afraid I don't have any suitable furniture," Doctor Strange said, sitting in one of the chairs. There was an old book, pale leather and paler parchment exuding a sense of age, resting on the table next to him. "Oh, and by the way, it _is_ Doctor Strange. Actual name. Actual Doctor." He smiled absently before frowning at the book. It obediently flipped open, pages ruffling. "Here we are."

They shared a glance but didn't ask; Steve didn't want to know.

"So, what happened was incredibly lucky. If anyone else had been at the focal point the elf's plan would have worked. Reality as you know it, possibly reality as we know it, would have been destroyed."

"Come again?" Steve said. "What would have worked?"

"I'm getting ahead of myself." He leaned forward. "What do you know about the multiverse?"

"Pal," Bucky said, "we know exactly jack about the multiverse."

"Ah. Right. Well, the universe you're _supposed_ to be in is only one of an infinite number of possible universes. Everything you can imagine, and even more that you can't, has the potential to exist somewhere. Not everything _does_ exist, but everything _can_. Think of it like, oh, seeds cast into soil. Some will sprout, some will lie in the dirt full of unrealised potential. Those ones are what your elf meant when he talked about unborn universes, and those unborn universes were where he was pulling those demons and stuffed animals and tentacles from. With me so far?"

Steve nodded, because he was following, or he thought he was, but Bucky was leaning forward, expression rapt, like he was soaking it in.

"As best I can tell, your elf was either trying to erase any trace of his presence or pulling an 'if I can't have the Tesseract-touched reality no one can', because what he did was drag an entire unborn reality into being. This one, the one we're living in right now. The one you _don't_ belong in. It was supposed to wipe out _your_ reality, to take its place, but it didn't, and that's where things get interesting."

"They weren't interesting before?" Steve asked dryly.

Doctor Strange's elegantly lifted shoulder and casually waved hand could have been a _no_ unwilling to commit itself, and that didn't bear thinking about. "Have you heard of Archimedes?"

They both nodded, but not without trading _what the hell?_ looks.

"Archimedes said _dos moi pou sto kai kino taen gaen_." At Steve and Bucky's blank looks, he sighed. "Fundamentally and for our purposes it translates to 'give me but one firm spot on which to stand, and I will move the earth'."

"And that has to do with what, exactly?" Steve asked, tail lashing, irritation creeping into his voice. Bucky's fingers brushed his elbow and he settled, but this talking in circles was getting on his nerves.

"It has to do," he leaned forward, eyes piercing as he fixed them on Steve, "with you." He shifted his gaze to Bucky. "With both of you. You were at ground zero. It influenced what happened. A _compatible_ unborn reality answered his call and it settled around you, settled _over_ you, like a sheet of paper with a hole in it. Without you, it would have been disastrous. Compatible or not, your reality would have been gone, replaced by the new one. Instead it's still there, just…smothered by this one. Trying to understand why kept bringing me back to you."

He leaned back.

"You see, the two of you, the two of you _together_ , as far as I can determine, exist in every universe, at least in every universe I was able to sneak a glimpse at. Shall I show you?"

He didn't wait for an answer, and the circle of fire flared into existence, darker, different, and through it they could see…themselves.

It was them but it wasn't them, it was a Steve and Bucky from long long ago, back when the threat of war had been nothing more than rumours in the newspaper. It was nothing Steve remembered: the two of them in a shitty tenement apartment, Bucky sitting on the floor, leaning on the wall, and it looked like there was only one chair—the one Steve was sitting in. They were eating sandwiches, Steve laughing so hard he was about to fall off the chair, and Bucky had one hand wrapped around Steve's ankle, grinning up at him, looking way too pleased with himself.

The view through the circle shimmered, shifted, and there was _Bucky_ in the Captain America uniform, the shield on his back, his metal arm gleaming in brilliant sunlight. Steve was standing next to him, but it was a Steve who'd never seen a drop of serum, never seen the inside of the Vita-Ray machine. He was wearing jeans, sneakers, a t-shirt, completely modern, leaning into Bucky's side, peaceful in a way Steve knew he'd never been.

Another shimmer, another shift, and a vast plain stretched before them, an army of men and women, this Steve and Bucky standing shoulder to shoulder among them. They were older and weary, longer hair, thick beards, and Steve's dark uniform was worn. Bucky's metal arm was different, elegant, more refined, black and gold with no sign of the star. They were together, heads held high, but whatever they were facing, Steve could tell they weren't sure they were coming out the other side.

He and Bucky moved at the same time, reaching out, but the picture blurred, shifted, and then it was endless Steves and Buckys, flipping past too fast for them to catch more than glimpses, snapshots of other times, other places, other _thems_. They were big and small, in cities, forests, fields, the sea, places Steve couldn't recognise, wasn't sure were even earth—and they weren't always human, but they were always them, always together.

Suddenly the fire-circle shivered, jerked, like something had grabbed it, and they saw Steve, sleeping peacefully in a perfectly ordinary apartment, darkness draped across him, and a hundred eldritch eyes opened out of the inky blackness and stared back, curiosity and warning and nothing remotely human but still oh so familiar…

"And I think we'll stop there." The circle winked out of existence. "Once they start looking back it's best to shut it down."

"What _was_ that?" Bucky asked, but Steve could hear in his voice that he knew. Just like Steve knew. That had been them, just like everything before had been them.

"You. Both of you. As you can see, centaurs aren't even close to the strangest way the multiverse has given rise to you." He steepled his fingers together and regarded them over the top, like they were something entirely unknown. "But it does keep giving rise to you, to the two of you, together."

"Us."

"You. Archimedes needed a solid place to stand and move the world. You two, you're solid enough to anchor your entire reality's existence. You could be his solid place to stand and shift the multiverse. Different beings, different times, different places, but you're always together, like a steel core driven through the heart of reality. It's _fascinating_. I'd love to study you," a noise that wasn't quite a growl emanated from Bucky and Steve shifted so he was standing between them, "or perhaps not."

"But you can fix it, you can," Steve hadn't had the vocabulary for centaurs; he sure as hell didn't have the vocabulary for this, "peel the two realities apart?"

"I can. Now that I know how he did it, and with the two of you as a focal point, I can undo it."

"What happens to everyone here? What happens to this us?"

"This reality didn't exist as anything but a potential, but it exists now. When I separate them, it will continue to exist. The two of you who will belong to this reality will rush in to fill the space you leave behind."

"But they don't exist _now_."

"No. This reality's history believes they existed, but it's wrong. That history was created at the same moment this reality was."

"Right. Right." Steve nodded to himself, his idea from before once more waving to get his attention. "Could you give us a minute?" he asked.

"Certainly," he replied, although not without a look of curiosity. He walked out of the room, his cloak rising to keep them in view as long as possible, like a charmed cobra that didn't want to miss anything.

When he was gone, Bucky turned to Steve. "You've got that look on your face."

"I know." Steve stretched out a hoof and contemplated the gleam of light on black, the fluffy fall of blond hair. "What if we stayed?"

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"What if we stayed? I'm talking about what if we stayed. What if we stayed like this?"

"We're not staying like this. That's crazy."

"But you don't hurt. You don't hurt anymore. You don't hurt here."

Bucky's expression went soft and he brushed his fingers against Steve's hand. "Steve. Would you really stay like this," and he waved, taking in in all of Steve, "like _this_ , forever, just so I didn't hurt?"

"In a heartbeat."

"Jesus Christ, why?"

"Because I remember."

Bucky just stared at him, baffled, tail swishing back and forth. "What'd you mean, you remember?"

"I remember what it was like when the pain…stopped. Like someone flipped a switch. That's kinda what happened, if you think about it. I stepped into the Vita-Ray machine and they flipped a bunch of switches and pumped me full of the serum and when it was done I didn't hurt anymore."

There were questions in Bucky's eyes, questions he knew Bucky wouldn’t ask, so he answered them anyway. "Yes, Bucky. Back then? I always hurt. All the time. That was the first time I didn't."

Bucky tapped the floor with his hoof. "I know my memory's spotty, but you never let on how bad it was. Did you?"

"No." Bucky's eyes narrowed and Steve wanted to laugh at the shades of long-ago Bucky in that anger for something long-ago Steve had hidden from him. "I couldn't, could I? There was nothing anyone could do, it wouldn’t have helped anything. It was just part of who I was, and you and Ma would only have worried even more than you already did." 

"Always had to be the tough guy, even back then."

Steve smiled gently and caught Bucky's left hand with fingers even more gentle. "I know you don't hurt here, like this. If you want to stay, we can stay."

"No. No, we're not staying like this. We have to go back. I don't even think we _could_ stay here." He chewed his bottom lip. "But I'll let Stark look at the arm, okay?"

"Not for me. Don't do it for me. Not, I'm not going to let you force yourself to do things you don't want for me."

"Oh, but you'd stay here as a centaur for me."

"That's different."

"How?"

"It just is."

Bucky glared at him and Steve glared back. "Don't think we're done with that one, but," the glare softened and he gripped Steve's fingers tight, "what if it wasn't just for you?"

"Buck?"

Bucky looked away, stamping one hoof. "I need the arm. It's mine, and I need it because it's something I took from HYDRA and made into something good. They wanted it to be a weapon, they made it to be a weapon, to hurt people, to fuck over the whole world, and I'm turning it into, into something good. To make up for everything they did."

"You know it's not—"

"I know. I know, it wasn't my choice, I know it wasn't my fault, but there's scales that've gotta be balanced and someone has to do it. Who else is gonna do it but me?"

"Me, for one, but Buck." Steve's heart was overflowing into his soul, his whole body brimming with love. "If that's what you're worried about." He reached out and cupped Bucky's face in both hands. "You don't have to. You don't need the arm. You've got you." Bucky looked at him blankly. "Something you took from HYDRA and made into something good. That's you. It's always been you."

"Stop looking at me like that."

"No. Never." Steve kissed him lightly. "I love you."

"I know. I love you, too. It doesn't mean you're allowed to look at me like that."

"How are you gonna stop me?"

Bucky ducked his head and shoved it into Steve's shoulder and Steve threaded his fingers into Bucky's hair and kissed the top of his head. "You're the something good. You took yourself back, you found yourself, you set yourself free, and Bucky, you are so good."

For long moments, Bucky was stiff in his arms, then he melted. Steve gathered him up, as much as he could. Bucky sighed and said, "We're not staying like this."

"No."

"It was a lousy idea."

"Hey, I already agreed with you we're not staying."

He felt Bucky smile against his skin. "I'll let him look." After a moment or two, Bucky added, "Maybe I'll even let him fix me up with something better like he's been wanting to, replace the 'primitive technology' with something lighter, something that's not gonna bust me up inside every time I use it. Maybe something like that black and gold number that other me was wearing." 

He fell silent, and Steve hurt remembering the sheer world-weariness in the eyes of their other selves. "Do you think they'll be okay?"

"Christ, Steve, I hope so. At least they're together. But there's nothing we can do. All we can do is look after us." Bucky straightened, looking Steve in the eye. "And I want something from you. I want you to start saying no. I want you to start pushing back. People need to learn you're not their Cap doll."

"I'll try."

Bucky searched his face.

"It's the best I can give you, Buck."

"Then I'll take it," he said and kissed him, light at first, but it got deeper, more intense, Bucky's hands hauling him in and Steve pressed closer, one hand tangled in Bucky's hair as he forced himself not to think about logistics.

"Finished?" rang through the room as Doctor Strange returned.

There was no way he hadn't been listening, not to time it so perfectly, but Steve didn't care. Neither did Bucky, judging by the way he nosed against Steve's neck and pressed one last kiss under his ear before saying, "For the moment."

"Then let's get started, shall we?"

Steve lifted his head. "Do it."

Green light slowly filled the room, symbols Steve didn't understand, that hurt his eyes to focus on, swirling through the air, and a brilliant red circle spun to life, casting shadows of things that didn't exist to cast them.

At least things that didn't exist _here_.

"Go." Doctor Strange's voice was strained, his cloak wrapped tight around him. "Now."

They let go of each other and bolted through the portal, the room rippling and warping around them, and tumbled into their reality in a blaze of brilliant golden light.


End file.
